He got started after high school with earning a living with his brother getting clams from the river bed as a diver, and then realized that he wanted to make a big difference cleaning the trash out of the Mississippi.
Since then, he bought a barge, expanded his operation, got some cranes, excavators, more barges, boats, crew, and now he goes to where the work is on the Anacostia, Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio Rivers ... making a difference, like during Katrina his crew went on down river, and anchored to be a huge help in patching roofs with a crew of carpenters, and delivering ice after Hurricane Harvey.
Recently, the crew helped the Cincinnati police pull 21 cars out of the Ohio river, https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/hamilton-county/cincinnati/more-than-a-dozen-cars-pulled-from-the-ohio-river-in-large-scale-cleanup-operation and 10 cars out in Louisville Kentucky, https://www.fox19.com/2022/10/25/authorities-have-recovered-10-cars-ohio-river-last-week-heres-why/ and through the years he has put together the largest collection of "messages in bottles" in the world, PLUS is making pallets out of plastic bottles pulled out of the river jetsam.
Making pallets out of plastic bottles is genius... the scummy people that throw plastic bottles into ditches, sewers, streams, rivers, etc that the many floods in the midwest push downstream, well, they will never stop. And the plastic is then free to whoever cleans up the river
It's unlikely that Americans, or anyone else, will ever stop this fad of constantly wasting plastic bottles for water, so, there is not a foreseeable future where there isn't a couple million pounds of plastic bottles a year washing down the Mississippi and those are easy to grind down, and recycle into plastic pallets.
Plastic pallets last much longer than wood ones. Plastic pallets are RECYCLEABLE! They can be used about 400 times by trucking companies before they are broken, AND then they can be ground up AND REUSUED to make NEW plastic pallets.
43% of hardwood trees are cut down to make single use pallets. If a big company buys 100,000 pallets, that saves 12,500 trees.
NO TREES are killed to make pallets when recycling water bottles. The river gets cleaned up, the bottles get recycled, trees CONTINUE to make OXYGEN and contain carbon dioxide.
That, is a win win situation.
When working with Cincinnati to clean up the river, not only were 21 cars pulled out of the Ohio, but 4,153 pounds of trash from the banks of the river were removed, which included 177 pounds of plastic, 16.5 tires, four propane tanks and a refrigerator.
Interesting observation about his non-profit, is that of the crews, there have been 13 marriages and only 1 divorce
Kudos to John Deere for donating a long reach excavator!
I lived in the Maysville/Ripley/Cincy area for 11 years, I've never seen so much roadside trash in my life being from the Northeast. What they need is a bottle bill, and they need it badly.....it's really pretty bad, I don't know what the locals are thinking.
ReplyDeleteI was raised in Michigan, which had a 10 cent refund on every bottle and can, in the 80s when that was real money for a handful of empties. As a poor kid, to just bring a bag along when walking the mile to my grandparents house, and grab the few cans and bottles that were tossed from cars heading out of town to the lakes, I'd get enough for a Snickers candy bar (40 cents) or a can of soda (40 or 50 cents) in one day.
DeleteNow that I live in San Diego where the homeless are constantly going through the garage cans and dumpsters for the aluminum cans, I can tell you that the "crv/California redemption value" of recycling aluminum is all it takes to get some few very poor people to look for and bring to the recycle centers, every damn can that is thrown into any garbage can throughout the city. I've met a guy named John who would fill a garbage bag or two every day, on his bike, as he went on his normal route of about a 10 mile loop through the park and city. Every weekend his brother would swing by and they'd use his truck to bring all those to the recycle center. I don't know how much that was worth, but since John was on a social security income, it was all bonus tax free.
I was impressed by the story about Chad winning an award, I think from CNN, for his work. He decided on the spot to split the $100,000 prize among the other nominees, and his sponsors ended up giving him more than the prize money afterwards.
ReplyDeleteme too, that's just the one thing that is impressive about him. The other 9 people who were up for the 100k award were also awesome, but really, I doubt any of them would have responded to the win, with an even split of the money, as he did, feeling that they all were equally due that award. Just incredible. But then, he is an incredible guy, doing amazing stuff!
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