Picking Up The Pieces: Jeff Kirschner

Jul 16, 2014 1:55 PM ET
Jeff Kirschner

Audio File

Anyone who is on social media knows how often you can be inundated with picayune details of your friends’ daily lives. But what if all that over-sharing could be turned into something productive and beneficial? What if, instead of just being a source of information on what your high school friend had for lunch today, or how great your niece’s new shoes look, social media could work to create a buzz around something really important, like picking up litter?

Today’s guest on Sea Change Radio, Jeff Kirschner, has figured out how to harness the over-sharing tendency of social media users to help us all clean up our act. The new platform Litterati enables everyone with a smart-phone to find litter, pick it up, and deposit it not only into a trash receptacle but into a data repository with a multitude of uses. Kirschner explains how this platform is generating a mountain of detailed data about litter, creating a mechanism for crowdsourced pressure on corporations, and inspiring people of all ages to be better stewards of our planet.