As someone who frequently weaves out of my path to pick up the tiny scrap of plastic on the sidewalk on the other side of the road, I recently read an article that made my stomach feel queasy. In that article, Bloomberg’s Justin Bachman told the story of the “orbiting junkyard” that floats around the earth.
This orbiting landfill is rarely shown on satellite views of the planets, and it isn’t blocking our view of the stars, but Bachman points out it is “presenting plenty of hassles for satellite operators who do business in orbit.” The debris field has been growing over the last decade. Notably due to a satellite destroyed by a missile test and the collision of one defunct satellite with another owned by Iridium Communications Inc.—consider an estimated 2,500 pieces from the first satellite alone, each of which are traveling at about 18,000 mph. As Bachman explains, “a 1-centimeter-wide aluminum sphere in low-earth orbit packs the kinetic equivalent of a safe moving at 60 mph.” Unsurprisingly, considering those numbers, the debris field in low-earth orbit is quickly becoming a minefield for functioning satellites.
Entrepreneurs are looking to capitalize on “the detritus of unmanned and manned space flight” by tracking the debris, helping satellite operators avoid the pieces of junk. The DoD also maintains a public database that tracks some 20,000 pieces of waste, while the Air Force has contracted Lockheed Martin to develop a “Space Fence” radar system to track as many as 200,000 objects.
This kind of tracking capacity is becoming increasingly necessary as more and more junk is created—enough junk that some worry low-earth orbit could eventually become “commercially dubious.” While this fear—supported by the an idea that was originally presented by retired NASA astrophysicist Donald Kessler in 1978, that each time pieces of junk collide, they break apart to create more junk—is considered by many to be a concern for the distant future, it’s still a distinct possibility.
Perhaps to many of us this kind of litter seems too distant to be a concern, let alone a source of guilt, but it parallels data being gathered by Jeff Kirschner and his band of (Instagram) followers.
Rather than tracking space junk, those with the Litterati app use images and geotags to track litter. Each tag is then integrated into a map that shows where the trash was collected and allows users to ‘tag’ the type of litter. As I’m writing this, Litteroti reports collecting 340,832 pieces of litter.

The moment of Kirschner’s inspiration for the app that began as an Instagram movement was specific; he tells the story in his TED Talk:
“We were hiking in the Oakland woods when my daughter noticed a plastic tub of cat litter in a creek. She looked at me and said, "Daddy? That doesn't go there."
“When she said that, it reminded me of summer camp. On the morning of visiting day, right before they'd let our anxious parents come barreling through the gates, our camp director would say, ‘Quick! Everyone pick up five pieces of litter.’ You get a couple hundred kids each picking up five pieces, and pretty soon, you've got a much cleaner camp. So I thought, why not apply that crowdsourced cleanup model to the entire planet? And that was the inspiration for Litterati.”
After that, Kirschner began taking pictures of the litter he picked up, and the movement progressed from Instagram to its very own app—but not before it helped San Francisco double the litter fee on cigarette sales. As told by the San Francisco Examiner, between 2009 and 2014, cigarettes went from 22% to 53% of recorded litter, so the city increased the tax, making cigarette retailers responsible for collecting it. Then, as Kirschner describes, “they got sued by big tobacco, who claimed that collecting information with pencils and clipboards”—as the survey was done—“was neither precise nor provable.” So, they used Litterati, which Kirschner brags not only helped them defend and double the tax, but was able to tell them if the cigarette was “a Parliament or a Pall Mall” with photographic and geographic proof.

With Jeff Kirschner’s Litterati, tracking made a difference by proving a litter source and, at times, prompting a change from institutions or brands. As he says, the litter ‘fingerprint’ “provides both the source of the problem and the path to the solution.” Hopefully over time, tracking space junk will be able to prompt the same kind of change, since we’re currently just creating a path through the junk without ever removing any of it.
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Download Litterati at the Apple Store or sign up for a reminder once the Android version is available (you have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page).
Image credits to NASA, Litterati, and the contributors to Litterati’s Instagram.
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