The app has contributed to collecting and documenting62 nearly 7.5 million pieces of trash worldwide (as of July 2023) thanks to a global user base of around 10,000 citizen scientists (as of 2021).63 The app lists a host of cooperation partners from the scientific, civil and educational sectors and provides individual waste and material lists, depending on their research interest. Once app users select a list, they can enter the waste items collected, although a photo is not necessarily required as proof. In order to meet scientific requirements, the app offers additional functions to ensure GPS accuracy for locating waste and to document the route waste collectors took. This function serves to provide analytical information about where and at which points no waste has been found. The data is then transmitted directly to the online database and can be accessed and downloaded from anywhere in the world.64 Launched in 2015, the Litterati app, which was also developed in the US and is now used in 135 countries, pursues a similar goal: to understand why particularly large or small amounts of litter accumulate in certain streets, parks, or neighborhoods in order to develop solutions for local litter problems in collaboration with cities, food establishments, or brand companies. For example, data collected through the app, which has already been used to record 19 million items of waste (as of July 2023), helped to successfully introduce a cigarette tax in San Francisco where app users collected and documented more than 5,000 cigarette butts after the introduction of the tax initially failed due to a lawsuit filed by large tobacco companies. Thanks to the photos taken and documentation of the time of collection, the location, and brand of cigarettes, the urgency to introduce the tax was proven and ultimately held up in court.65 In addition to tracking waste, the app also offers insights into the amount of waste collected worldwide by the Litterati community as well as opportunities to organize collection competitions among app users or participate in research assignments.66 As with the Marine Debris Tracker app, Litterati also provides free access to the data on collected waste, which is updated monthly and can only be viewed for the course of one calendar year at a time.67 An analytical tool tailored to cities as part of the City Fingerprint Project also serves to allow decision-makers to draw conclusions about waste concentration areas, such as in shopping areas or illegal waste dumps, and thus provides the datadriven scientific basis for deriving effective measures to combat waste. This tool employs artificial intelligence to evaluate the image data collected with the help of the app.68 The London-based social enterprise Unwaste.io Ltd. has set out to collect valid and robust data on plastic bottles found in the environment and document the associated brands together with cooperation partners in Congo, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. In support of this measure, local 62 Marine Debris Tracker (n. d.) (1) 63 Marine Debris Tracker (2021) 64 Marine Debris Tracker (2020) 65 TED (2017) 66 Litterati (n. d.) (1) 67 Litterati (n. d.) (2) 68 Litterati (n. d.) (3) Litterati-App Source: Litterati 46
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