SBIR Phase I: Building a Global Community to Crowdsource-Clean the Planet

The broader impact/commercial potential of this SBIR Phase I project stems from developing a crowdsourced solution to litter - one of the world's most pervasive and toxic problems. To many, it's dirty, disgusting, and someone else's problem to solve. Unfortunately, we all suffer the consequences, as litter impacts our economy, degrades the environment, demoralizes community pride, kills wildlife, and poisons the food system. This project aims to develop a mobile technology that empowers anyone to identify, map, and collect the world?s litter, while simultaneously connecting to a broader community of associated brands, cities, schools. By crowdsourcing the data and cleanup, there is great potential in collecting massive amounts of information which can be used for everything from infrastructure improvement, to resource allocation, brand packaging redesign, and even individual responsibility and behavioral change. The intellectual merit of this project is derived from building a global database of litter. And one critical need to achieving such a monumental task is the ability to quickly (and accurately) identify any piece of litter, anytime, anywhere even if the litter is in a deep state of decay and decomposition. This project further aims to integrate that information with other data sets including location, time, proximity to schools, and the watershed. By leveraging technologies such as image recognition and machine learning, the project will further empower the people who are crowdsourcing the data and cleanup to collect a vast amount of identifiable information.