This city is not a bin: Crowdmapping the distribution of urban litter

Urban litter, such as cans, packaging, and cigarettes, has significant impacts, and yet little is known about its spatio-temporal distribution, with little available data. In contexts of data scarcity, crowdsourcing provides a low-cost approach to collecting a large amount of geo-referenced data. We consider 1.7 million litter observations in the Netherlands, collected by the crowdmapping project Litterati. First, we analyze the biases of this data at the province and municipality level. Second, in a local case study with high-quality data (the city of Purmerend), we investigate the spatial distribution of urban litter and the points of interest that attract it. This study's findings can support both the crowdmapping process, steer volunteers' efforts, and policy-making to tackle litter at the urban level. This article met the requirements for a gold–gold JIE data openness badge described at http://jie.click/badges.