Chad Pregracke was still in his teens when he started cleaning up the banks of the Mississippi River. He began by picking up and recycling more than 45,000 pounds of trash along 100 miles of the shore.
The next year, 1998, he founded Living Lands and Waters. It protects, preserves, and restores our rivers. Now it has 14 members, and more than 98,000 volunteers have pitched in. So far, they’ve cleaned up 9.2 million pounds of garbage. This includes more than 78,000 tires, 1,100 refrigerators, 268 TV sets, and 28 bathtubs. Thanks to their hard work, more and more people see how necessary it is to preserve our rivers and the lands around them.