What’s that old saying? “One man’s trash is Mark Olmsted’s mission”? Or, something like that.
For the last five years, Olmsted, a 52-year-old subtitle editor, has methodically collected litter every morning in his Hollywood neighborhood as he walks his dog. He is the self-proclaimed “Trash Whisperer.”
With infinite patience and an E-Z Reacher tool, he’s cleaning up his corner of the earth and finding that doing good affects him as much as it does the world around him — even if his neighbors don’t quite get it.
We recently caught up with him by phone while he was collecting trash. He explained, “I was a drug addict and a drug dealer for many years and I went to prison in 2004 for 10 months. When I got out, I really committed to sobriety. The first months were kind of tough. One day I was walking along saying the Serenity Prayer, hating all the litter, and I said to myself, ‘Well, you have to accept this because what are you going to do, pick it up?’” Well, yes.
Now his clean routine is a source of great comfort to him. “It proved to be this one thing that I could do everyday so that no matter what else happened, I could go to sleep saying, I picked up five bags of trash today,” he says. “I’m sort of adapting to the universe instead of asking the universe to adapt to me.”
He estimates that he has picked up somewhere around 10,000 bags of trash since he started five years ago. There are a lot of empty cigarette packs, Starbucks cups, potato chip wrappers, corn cobs and — “to my great distress,” Olmsted says — diapers. He gives the empty bottles and cans to those he runs across who collect them to redeem for cash.
As important as his mission has become, he’d like to point out that it wouldn’t be nearly as necessary if the city of Los Angeles would install trash cans on all the main thoroughfares. “You can’t challenge people not to litter when they don’t have any place to put the litter.” Come on, LA!
Five months ago, Olmsted found out that his trash-collecting can have a much greater impact than beautifying the neighborhood. He met a man who was living outdoors on a mattress along his route. “At first I wanted him to go away,” Olmsted says, “and then I decided to say, ‘Hi, how are you?’”
He developed a friendship with the man, Chris, and helped him get his birth certificate, apply for Social Security benefits and locate long-lost family members. Now Chris is on his way to a treatment program. “This all came from my willingness to pick up a piece of trash and treat another human being the same way I’d treat the street,” a stunned Olmsted says.
In December, the Trash Whisperer delivered his first lecture, titled “The Six Spiritual Principles of Picking Up Trash.” Watch a snippet in the video below and then ask him to give it at your school, nonprofit or company. Get in touch, follow his adventures or check up on Chris on the Trash Whisperer blog.
Photo courtesy of Mark Olmsted.