2016
Vultures Mapping Illegal Dumps in Lima
Services
Service Design, Environmental Data Strategy, Digital Communications, Behaviour-Change Design, Stakeholder Engagement
Team
Lead Service & Communications Designer (USAID), Environmental Policy Team, Peruvian Ministry of Environment Data & GIS Specialists, Creative / Media Team.
Turning Vultures into High-Tech Environmental Sensors
Illegal Waste Mapping
Environmental Data Intelligence
Civic Engagement & Reporting
Urban Sanitation Innovation
Public–Government Collaboration
Overview
Lima produces thousands of tons of waste every day, and a significant share ends up in illegal dumps along rivers, roadsides, and informal areas, far from official landfills. Traditional monitoring systems couldn’t keep up with the scale of the problem. Gallinazo Avisa (“Vultures Warn”) took an unconventional path: equipping rescued black vultures with GPS trackers and GoPro cameras so they could help locate hidden garbage hotspots from the sky and feed that data into a live, public map. As the Innovation Expert on the USAID side, I worked at the intersection of technology, environment, and public engagement: shaping how vulture-generated data would be translated into actionable insights for authorities, and how the story would be told so that residents didn’t just watch vultures fly, they understood the problem and felt invited to act.
Seeing What the City Couldn’t
Using the Sky to Reveal Hidden Dumps
Lima has only a handful of official landfills for nearly 10 million residents; the rest of the city’s waste often leaks into informal dumping sites that are hard to track from the ground. Vultures, however, naturally seek out decaying waste. Instead of fighting this behaviour, Gallinazo Avisa turned it into an environmental asset: by fitting selected birds with lightweight GPS units and GoPro cameras, their flight paths and footage could reveal where illegal dumps were concentrated. My role involved mapping the end-to-end service flow, from vulture flight and data capture, to GPS and video stream ingestion, to visualizing dumps on a live map, to coordinate municipal response. The design challenge was to make this system reliable enough for authorities to act on, while still being intuitive and engaging for the public.
From Raw Flight Data to Actionable Maps
Designing the Environmental Intelligence Layer
Vultures generate messy, continuous movement data. What city officials and citizens needed, instead, were clear signals: “Here is a likely dump site. Here is where to act.” Working with environmental authorities, data specialists, and the creative team, I helped design: 1- Data rules for identifying potential dumping hotspots based on flight patterns and recorded footage. 2-A public-facing map where these hotspots could be visualized in near real time. To mix them together and create a simple feedback loop linking citizen reports and vulture data, so both could reinforce each other. Instead of just broadcasting a message, we co-created a service ecosystem: vultures scan, systems map, authorities act, and residents participate.
Storytelling for a Strange but Powerful Idea
Making High-Tech Vultures Understandable and Human
Pitching this concept was not easy. On paper, “we’re using vultures with cameras to fight garbage” sounded too unconventional, even humorous, for many stakeholders. Some worried it would undermine the seriousness of the waste problem; others were unsure people would engage with birds as “partners.” Together with the communications team and local partners, I worked on humanizing the story: 1- Giving each vulture a name and personality, 2- Framing them as “dark superheroes” helping the city, and grounding all messaging in real health and environmental stakes, not just spectacle. By tailoring how we communicated to different audiences, government leaders, local communities, youth, and media, we turned initial skepticism into curiosity, and curiosity into participation. Within weeks, the project had tens of thousands of interactions online and strong public recognition. And of course, data speaks louder than anything else at the end.
Impact
From Flight Paths to Cleaner Ground
Gallinazo Avisa showed how nature, technology, and people can work together to tackle urban waste. Vultures equipped with GPS and cameras helped identify clusters of illegal dumps, feeding data into a live map that supported authorities’ decisions on where to intervene first. At the same time, the project sparked broad public engagement. Residents followed the vultures online, learned about the scale of the waste problem, and contributed their own reports of polluted sites. This blend of environmental sensing and civic participation created a new kind of environmental service: one that made the invisible visible, and turned a stigmatized bird into a symbol of collective responsibility.
10
Vultures equipped with GPS + cameras
A trained squadron of scavengers became real-time environmental sensors over Lima.
City-wide
Illegal dump hotspots mapped
Flight data and video helped reveal hidden waste clusters across the metropolitan area.
20,000+
Early social interactions
In the first phase, the initiative quickly gathered online attention and reports from citizens.
100%
From data to action
Authorities gained a new decision-support tool, while citizens were invited to co-own the problem and its solutions.
// The selected images illustrate how GPS-equipped vultures, field teams, and digital mapping tools worked together to identify and visualize illegal waste sites across Lima. //
Reflection
Working on Gallinazo Avisa taught me how powerful unconventional innovation becomes when it is paired with the right story, the right communication approach, and a service system that truly respects the people it is meant to serve. I collaborated with incredible individuals from Peru, the United States, environmental NGOs, data scientists, and creative agencies, each bringing their own cultural rhythms, design languages, and expectations. The project became a living example of how diverse teams can create something none of us could have built alone. Convincing stakeholders to take seriously the idea of using vultures equipped with GoPro cameras and GPS trackers was one of the most challenging phases of my career. At first, many people laughed, hesitated, or dismissed the concept as too strange to be a real environmental solution. But by deeply understanding each audience, their fears, motivations, pride, and frustrations, we reframed the narrative from “vultures with cameras” to “a new way to see what the city cannot.” That shift changed everything. Once people understood the purpose, not just the technology, they leaned in. Authorities began to trust the data. Citizens began to participate. The city began to see itself from above. For this work, I received an award from the American government, a recognition that meant a great deal to me, because it affirmed that bold ideas, when handled with empathy and cultural sensitivity, can become powerful tools for public good.
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