In 1997, an Illinois man decided to clean up the river himself; nearly three decades later, his organisation has removed 14 million pounds of rubbish

In 1997, Chad Pregracke got tired of waiting for someone else to clean up the Mississippi River. He grew up near East Moline, Illinois, and had spent years on the water. He knew how much trash was piling up there. He kept calling government agencies, but little changed, so he decided to do it himself.

Almost thirty years later, his organization, Living Lands & Waters, has pulled about 14 million pounds of trash out of America’s rivers. Its work has grown well beyond cleanups.

The Mississippi was practically Chad’s back yard. His parents, KeeKee and Gary, were teachers who loved the river, and he and his older brother, Brent, spent most of their childhood on it.

His first job was digging clams, which gave him a close look at the river, both above and below the surface. By the time he was 17, he was calling government agencies to report the trash, figuring someone else would take care of it. Year after year passed, and the problem only got worse.

1997: He stopped waiting

In 1997, Chad decided that if no one else would clean the river, he would. A year later, at 23, he started Living Lands & Waters, and it still does the work today.

The group now has a full staff and a fleet of equipment. Its crews work in an average of nine states a year along the Mississippi, Illinois and Ohio Rivers. The mission has grown to include student workshops, the MillionTrees Project, Adopt-a-River Mile, invasive species removal and The Great Mississippi River Cleanup.

Since 1998, the group has removed about 14 million pounds of trash, roughly 7,000 tons. Spread over nearly three decades, that works out to around half a million pounds a year.

In June 2002, Chad received the Jefferson Award for Public Service and accepted it at the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. In 2013, CNN named him its Hero of the Year. He also wrote a book, From the Bottom Up.

After almost 20 years of cleaning rivers from a barge, Chad and his wife, Tammy, kept running into the same problem. It was hard and expensive to find a place that would process the large, bulky, rigid plastic they pulled from the water.

So they started Green Current Solutions. The company makes custom injection-molded pallets from 100% recycled HDPE plastic, some of it collected during Living Lands & Waters cleanups.

Using recycled plastic pallets instead of wooden ones keeps plastic out of rivers, oceans, landfills and incinerators. It also means fewer trees are cut down, so more of them stay standing and keep storing carbon.