Here is Chipper, an 8-year-old dog, who is on a mission to collect plastic. In the Arizona wilderness, this very good boy is doing his part to save the planet.
Chipper and his mistress, Katie Pollak, are on a mission to help the environment, picking up trash wherever they find it near their home in Mesa, Arizona.
Chipper picks up the water bottles everywhere he goes. Katie Pollak, 31, realized that her dog had a passion for plastic shortly after adopting him from a shelter in 2011, when he showed a fascination for disposable water bottles.
“He started picking them up immediately, so I was encouraging him and rewarding him”» Pollak said. “And he motivated me to do the same. I really started going out and picking up more than before, so we created a kind of team.”
The couple enjoys going out, hiking, paddleboarding and walking around their area together. More than 28,000 people follow their adventures via Pollak’s Instagram account.
“He’s really been an inspiration”» Katie Pollak said. I participate in group clean-ups in the area and when people see him, they say: “Chipper is here! Then everyone can come and meet him and see what he is.”
Everywhere they go, they pick up bags and bags of garbage – beer cans, plastic bottles, abandoned clothes and the like – that other people have left behind. Pollak always comes with bags to pick up trash, and she was shocked by the amount of garbage she and her friends can pick up every day.
“It’s heartbreaking”» she says“ «but we love this area so much, and we really want to do our best to preserve the wilderness”.
Pollak and Chipper – and Pollak’s other dog, Quinci — often get together with friends to do big clean-ups. Many of them are part of an effort called Wild Keepers, which promises to collect 1 million kg of trash by 2023. They have been working on it since 2016 and have collected more than 200,000 kg so far.
