About

#Litterati is an Instagram hashtag that is used to document photographs of garbage found in the streets before disposing in the trash. The hashtag has since inspired a crowdsourced environmental campaign with the same name and the online gallery website Digital Landfill, which indexes various pieces of litter that have been spotted and removed by people from all over the world.

Origin

The Litterati movement originally began as a personal Instagram project by Jeff Kirschner^[4], who was inspired by his environmentally conscious daughter to start a voluntary street-cleaning campaign using the crowdsource model. On August 13th, 2012, Kirschner posted his first two #literatti images^[8] of a water bottle cap and an empty beverage bottle via Instagram.

Spread

Throughout the rest of 2012, the hashtag quickly took off on Instagram and soon began drawing user-submitted images of found trash from all over the world. After realizing the potential of geo-tagged metadata behind the project, Kirschner then launched the website The Digital Landfill^[3] to showcase the Instagram feed for #litterati, as well as a Google Maps document that shows the locations of geotagged images. In February, Litterati was nominated for a Shorty Awards^[15] in Activism category. On March 21st, 2013, Kirschner released a video explaining the backstory behind the Litterati project (shown below).

Between April and June 2013, Kirschner's Litterati project was covered by several environmentalist and internet news blogs, including The Starfish^[14], Take Part^[13] and Mashable^[7] among others.

Statistics

Notable Examples

As of June 2013, Instagram account @Litterati hosts more than 3,900 #litterati images and has more than 1,080 followers. Additional examples of user-submitted #litterati images can be found on other image-sharing platforms such as Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook.

Search Interest

External References