Jetsam

Jetsam is an environmental tech company founded in 2019 by Steve Bomford and Louis Capitanchik with a vision of supporting all of the other amazing community efforts through the use of technology and data. The app, also called Jetsam, was launched in 2020 to make it super simple to track waste in our neighbourhoods.

Android Phones: If your phone runs Android 5 or later, it will run Jetsam. Generally this means all Android phones released from 2015 onwards

iOS Phones: If your phone runs iOS 11 or later, it will run Jetsam. Generally this means all iOS phones from the iPhone 7 onwards

Other devices: Tablets, Desktops & Laptops are not officially supported. If you own a device that we don't support, please get in touch with us ([email protected]) and we'll see what we can do!

If you can safely walk there, you can use Jetsam there; anywhere in the UK. Cities, forests, beaches, and everywhere in between - just make sure you aren’t putting yourself or others in danger.

When you take a photo, your phone records your location, and sends this data to us. The photo you take will also be sent to us, but only when you’re connected to Wi-fi. In the future, we will be opening up the collection of pictures to the community to help us analyse things like the brands and types of plastic that have been photographed.

Nope! All you need to get going is to make sure your GPS is enabled. If you’re not connected to the internet, Jetsam will hold on to the data that you gather until the next time you open the app with an internet connection.

If you don’t have any data left, Jetsam will hold on to the photographs that you gather until you either connect to wifi, or have more data.

As soon as you install Jetsam, you can immediately start taking pictures of plastics without any extra steps. You can optionally sign up for an account to enable awesome new things like taking part in community survey events and tracking your plastics journey

A “survey” is an event that you can join through Jetsam so that the data you gather is shared with one of our partners. These range from other community groups to academic institutions. Each survey has different goals, so be sure to check them out.

There is no obligation to join a survey, but doing so can have a positive impact on our neighbourhoods by enabling more targeted action in collaboration with our partners.

It’s easiest to integrate Jetsam into your daily life. If you’re going to the shops, taking the kids to school or walking your dog, it’s super simple to take a few pictures with Jetsam. You can also organise litter hunts with your friends and family to go out and tag as much litter as you can.

If you are able to do so, we would encourage you to pick up any litter you find. We also understand that it’s not always feasible or safe to do so.

We primarily target plastic litter, but any type of litter can be photographed. When you use the camera, you can tag the litter you find by using the button at the top of the screen - tagging litter as “not plastic” really helps when we analyse the data.

As Jetsam grows, we’re going to run into a few issues every now and then. Get in touch with us at [email protected], or use the contact form on this website, and we’ll try to get back to you as quickly as we can.

As Jetsam grows, we’re going to run into a few issues every now and then. Get in touch with us at [email protected], or use the contact form on this website, and we’ll try to get back to you as quickly as we can.

We’re working on ways to automatically detect duplicate photos of litter. In the meantime, we manually handle duplicate photographs

More tools and more ways to engage with Jetsam! Our goal is to provide useful, actionable insights into the litter in your neighbourhood - this can take the form of plastic predictions, real time analysis of litter in the camera and more. We’re also looking to partner with local groups who are just as interested in making change happen as we are. If you have any suggestions, or want to partner with us, be sure to email [email protected]

In order to share information with the community, you will need to enable location services. We don’t track your location and we only fetch your GPS coordinates when you take a photo or interact with one of our location based services.

We’d love to chat with you! For general inquiries, please email [email protected]. If you want to talk to a specific member of the team, feel free to reach out to [email protected] and [email protected]. You can also find us on social media; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin

The most accurate way to tag litter right now is to take photos of individual pieces. We hear you though - that can get quite tedious! We’re working on ways to make it easier to tag large amounts of litter at once.