The Litterati Impact: Cleaning the Planet One Instagram at a Time

On a warm spring afternoon in Oakland, Jeff Kirschner was walking with his two children along one of their favorite neighborhood trails. As they walked, his daughter, then 4 years old, spotted a patch of bright yellow under a tree; as they got closer, they realized it was the lid of a container of kitty litter. “Daddy,” she said, “that doesn’t go there.”

Kirschner agreed: the remnants of a box of kitty litter didn’t belong there, covered in brush under a tree. It belonged in the trash. After all, that’s what we’re taught to do with things when we are done with them: throw them away. Kirschner and his kids walked over together, picked up the container and took it to the nearest trashcan.

His daughter’s straightforward observation—trash doesn’t belong there, let’s put it where it belongs—triggered something inside of Kirschner. While the 42-year-old writer, consultant, and entrepreneur is not exactly a stereotypical environmentalist, that day made him want to do something.

And so Litterati—a movement that combines social media and big data to change the way we look at, and catalog, litter—was born.