A Glasgow plumber has pulled 140 abandoned supermarket trolleys out of his local river in a month.
People keep putting them back.
Kieran McGregor, 32, has spent the past 30 days working through the Brock Burn in the south of the city.
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Alongside the trolleys he has hauled out wheelie bins, tyres and a PlayStation console.
He is on day 30 of a self-set 100-day challenge and reckons the burn needs about another week.
Fifty trolleys in a single stretch
“I’m a plumber by trade,” he told Creatorzine.
“This just annoyed me. The state of the river is terrible, so I’m getting them cleared.”
The scale surprised him once he started counting.
“There must have been over 50 trolleys in one bit.”
He worked alone for the first fortnight. Then people started showing up.
“For the first 14 days, I was by myself and then the community started coming on board. There are so many people wanting to get involved.”
The Levern is next, then wherever needs it
Kieran’s plan runs well past one waterway.
“I reckon the Brock Burn has another week of work, then the Levern needs a little more attention.
Maybe another week in the Levern and surrounding waters. I reckon another solid 30 days here and then I will move to other locations that need it badly.”
The bit he can’t fix by pulling harder
Some of the trolleys he removes do not stay removed.
“We’ve had trolls coming behind us and throwing all the trolleys back in,” he said.
“I’m just asking the public, please don’t throw rubbish in.”
He thinks the actual fix sits upstream, with the retailers whose trolleys keep ending up in the water.
“I want to work with the supermarkets somehow to try and stop the trolleys leaving the markets. Hopefully there’s a way we can come together.”
What the burn used to be
Kieran grew up around the water. He wants it back to something people would choose to walk beside.
“My main goal would be to make it a space for the local people. I’ve got memories of being a kid down there.
I just hope to give the community an opportunity for a space to use and the wildlife to come back through that area.”
“I love a nice-looking river flowing through the area.”
Glasgow City Councillor Roza Salih backed the effort. “Kieran is doing a brilliant job in cleaning up the burn, and I am really pleased he is raising awareness of the issue. He really cares about his community.”
Why It Matters
Clean-up content is one of the few things online where the reward is visible before the algorithm gets involved. A drained stretch of river photographs itself.
And the 100-day challenge is a content structure whether or not anyone sets out to make it one, with a counter, a visible target and a reason to come back tomorrow.
It is why environmental clean-up creators have built large audiences from work that is, functionally, just lifting heavy things out of cold water.
The genre has grown quickly on platforms that reward before-and-afters, from magnet fishing to litter picking to full river restoration.
The pull is the same each time. Something ugly becomes less ugly, and you can measure it.
Seventy days left, and the trolleys keep coming back.
