MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Glenn Morris has only been in Memphis for a few months and is already making his mark by cleaning up garbage around the city.
In 2019, Morris and his wife were using remote-controlled cars to knock down sandcastles left behind on the beach in Galveston, Texas. One day, Morris said his wife had the idea to start attaching small trailers to the back of the cars and using them to clean up the beach.
Morris is an engineer, so he built more than a dozen models of the Litter Buggies himself.
"You see people out picking up trash," Morris said. "You see the groups that do it, and they all do it the same way. There's a central area. They'll go and pick up stuff and people are carrying bags and what not. But these things make it so much easier.”
The Litter Buggies are remote-controlled and carry the garbage bag while he walks around picking up litter.
Morris started recording his clean up efforts, attracting more than 300,000 followers on TikTok.
Morris and his wife moved to Memphis in October 2023, and he continued his mission to pick up trash. For him, it’s a hobby that keeps him active and gives him something positive to do in his free time.
"It's good exercise," he said. "So I would go out and do 3 or 4 miles, pick up as much as I could and come back, and one, work on new designs to make the systems better and do it the next day.”
According to the Tennessee Department of Transportation, 88.5 million pieces of litter are on Tennessee roads at any given time.
Morris said he has walked about 30 miles and picked up about 780 gallons of trash in Memphis so far, mostly in Midtown and Downtown.