During an interpersonal group communication class, a group of motivated students decided to make an impact in the community of Ogden.

As part of the class, students are encouraged to bring awareness to an issue in the community. These students took it one step further.

Heather O‘Bannion, one of the students part of this interpersonal communication group, explained her group project started as a requirement, but has now impacted her life and hopes it can bring awareness to society and the community.

“It’s a class that requires you to do eight hours of community service, and we chose to clean up garbage around the city,” O’Bannion said.

Although the original plan was to pick up garbage as a requirement for community service for the class, the students were informed about an app that could be beneficial towards picking up trash called Litterati.

Litterati is an accessible app for both android and apple products that is free. The intention of the app is to capture a photograph of each piece of trash you encounter. Each piece is then documented.

The app also shows the statistics of how much trash pieces that have been collected in a day, areas that need cleaning around the state and provides challenges to inspire friendly competition to collect more trash.

After focusing on the recognition of Litterati, the students of the communication group focused on making a group on Litterati also known as “pliking,” a hybrid of “picking” up trash and “hiking.”

According to O’Bannion, “Our challenges are to pick up at least 300 pieces of garbage a day, we can continue to make new challenges for Weber State students.” All challenges are accessible to whomever would like to join.

The impact of this app can be beneficial as it can be applied to students that are in the outdoor program club and can also bring awareness and importance towards holidays such as earth day which lies on April 22. The awareness can spread to promising a better community starting at WSU.