Clean Up Australia: Automating Litter Analysis with AI

With support from our partners, we have been able to provide consultation to NFPs across Australia exploring the innovation of their services with the adoption of AI technology. 

At the APAC Digital Transformation Summit led by Infoxchange in Singapore, Linda Boettcher, Process Improvement Manager of Clean Up Australia, had a light-bulb moment about how AI could revolutionise their data capture processes using AI.  

Clean Up Australia has spent over three decades mobilising volunteers across the country to tackle environmental litter and pollution. In FY24 alone, more than one million people donned gloves and filled bags at over 16,000 registered clean up sites. Yet behind this success lay a growing problem: data collection.  

Until recently, Clean Up Australia asked volunteers to manually sort litter from their bags and complete a detailed 70+ item form, counting everything from cigarette butts to bottle caps. While essential for advocacy and policy influence, this process was labour-intensive and increasingly unsustainable.  

"We received some solid feedback from our valued volunteers,” Linda Boettcher shared. “They asked us what the point of relying on people to scrabble through smelly rubbish just to fill out a form? It's a waste of volunteers' time to produce statistics that cannot be relied on."  

This led to a simple suggestion that would spark their AI journey: “Wouldn’t it be great if you could just take a photo?” From that idea, Clean Up Australia began developing an AI-powered image recognition tool – which allows volunteers to snap a photo of collected litter and have it analysed automatically, reducing the need for manual data entry.  

"From my perspective, I want to make sure that with over a million volunteers, we can make this tool accessible, fun and easy to engage with."  

Accurate data is the lifeblood of Clean Up Australia's advocacy work. During the second phase of the APAC Digital Transformation Program this year, Infoxchange helped bring the AI solution to life, supporting the organisation through their vendor selection, and advised on the design and implementation of the new tool.  

By integrating AI into their litter tracking, the organisation will be able to gather more reliable and timely insights to produce their annual Litter Report and influence environmental policy in businesses and at government level.  

"We need this tool to provide us with data and real-time information so we can help influence what's happening in our environment." 

By removing the friction from data collection and enabling smarter insights, the organisation is ensuring it stays not only relevant but also transformative in the fight against litter and pollution.