Cleaning the Mississippi River with Chad Pregracke
Chad Pregracke founded Living Lands & Waters is a nonprofit environmental organization with a mission to clean up the Mississippi River and some of the tributaries. With the help of over 108,000 volunteers and countless supporters, they've removed over 10 million pounds of garbage from America’s rivers.
At age 17, Pregracke began calling government agencies to tell them about the problem. None of the calls resulted in action and the amount of trash on the river was growing.
I want to welcome our audience and introduce one of my great friends and, you know, one of the great, great, great longtime River activists, Chad Bedrocki.
You look like you're in the pilot house of your tugboat, are you?
Honestly, it's not just for the picture.
It's because it's the highest point with the best reception.
But yeah, it's a good place to be for sure.
Yeah.
And I don't know when did we meet the first time.
We met at that Waterkeeper event, one of the early Waterkeeper events.
Was it the one in New York?
There was one in California and then one in New York.
Yeah, we met at the San Diego one.
And then the one with Billy Joel, who Billy Joel hosted in Southampton, and he took us all out on his boat.
It was so cool, man.
Up in his airplane.
And we had invited Chad at that time to recruit him as the Mississippi Riverkeeper.
I think, as I recall, you had swum the Mississippi at that point or something.
You had done something really crazy that impressed a lot of people.
But Chad now operates a series of barges.
On the Mississippi, on the Tennessee, on the Ohio, he has 100,000 volunteers, and they clean up garbage, and they've cleaned up more garbage than anybody, I think, in the history of the world.
How many pounds of garbage have you pulled out of the river?
Within the next month or so, it'll exceed 11 million pounds.
He used to go in there just in a bathing suit and pull out tires.
I hope you're not doing that anymore.
No, I'm still at it.
Honestly, it keeps me youthful.
At least I think it does.
No, I'm still at it.
As you know, there's so much work to do.
And truthfully, most of the time, I feel like I'm just getting started.
Like you, I love what I do.
And I just not really work.
It's just life.
You know, it's like the more you do, you just get a great sense of accomplishment.
And I get to, you know, be around the water and surround yourself with great people.
And it makes it happen, you know?
What does your fleet look like now?
Last time I talked to you, which was a couple of years ago, you had about, I don't know, three or four barges and a whole fleet of John boats that were actually out there with personnel pulling garbage up and filling the John boats.
So we have five barges, we have two tow boats, we have six 30-foot workboats, That'll haul, you know, 5,000 pounds apiece.
They haul volunteers.
They haul the trash.
We custom make them.
We have a welding shop as part of our office headquarters for our land-based operations.
You know, we go town to town, city to city, do a cleanups.
Then on one of the barges, it's our floating headquarters.
It's actually made out of an old strip club.
I know it sounds crazy, but I recycled it and built it on there.
But it's a classroom floor.
For kids, and we typically have high school students, juniors and seniors, just because they're very impressionistic at that time.
And I have two great environmental educators that live aboard here.
One guy, I met him, he was rapping with a jazz band about 14 years ago.
He turned out to be a history teacher.
He joined a year later.
It's a wonderful team of people, and, you know, everybody's just as dedicated as I am, and we get a lot done for what we have, you know?
Are you still out of Moline, Illinois?
That's where I think you were out of when...
Yeah, East Moline.
20 or 25 years ago, whenever we met.
Yeah.
Actually, it was more than that.
Yeah.
It was 27 years ago, and you were out of Moline.
You grew up swimming and fishing and hunting on the Mississippi, and I think you worked as a clamor for a while.
Yeah, no, and honestly...
At the time, it was really tough, dangerous work.
Clamming, that is.
That's what we call it.
It's essentially being a muscle diver on the bottom of the Mississippi River, spending about 8 to 10 hours a day on the bottom of the river.
That really solidified a connection to the river that most people have never had.
When you're down there, you can't see anything.
It's like being in a cave and You're the anchor for the boat, got a lead weight belt on about 100 pounds, and you're crawling upstream, but you can't see it all, but you can hear.
And what you can hear are all these fish communicating, like, from all over.
Like, catfish sound like bullfrogs.
This time of year, they're schooled up, so they're really active.
They're spawning, and drum are going click, click, click, click, click.
So, really cool.
It was a great experience to have, and I basically, I can't say I crawled every inch of it, but I crawled about a 150-mile stretch of the river over six summer seasons.
And so I just kind of, you know, had that experience and then camped out on all the islands to save money.
And that's where I kind of, you know, just really fell in love with the river beyond growing up on it.
Just like kind of just...
That's what led me to where I am today.
After I stopped doing that and started cleaning up, that's when I met you.
It's pretty cool.
It's good to see you again.
It must also be scary underwater when you hear the propellers, the screws of these big barges that are probably scraping the bottom right near you.
You can hear them.
You can hear those.
You can really hear, like, just regular motorboats.
Like, they're really high-pitched, you know, and honestly, it's eerie because they, I mean, even if they're 100 feet away, they feel like they're right on top of you, and you have an air hose, you know, that gets pumped there, so you're always worried about the air hose getting cut or what have you.
But, you know, you can hear a radio, too, and 28 foot above you.
And that's how good you can hear certain days.
Sometimes the current's ripping so fast that all you can hear is your bubbles and everything's flapping down there.
But on certain areas, you can hear all the fish.
You can hear barges.
You can hear motorboats.
I mean, kind of depends on the day, you know?
And what were you doing with the mussels, Chad?
Selling them for the culture pearl industry.
So...
I would take them, they bought them by the pound, you'd sort them out by the species, you know, like a ringer.
And I started out just being, I just sorted out for my brother and then I started diving.
Then they'd get shipped to Japan.
Then Japan would punch little beads in them.
Then they'd put those surgically and plant those little beads in their oysters.
Then they'd have big racks in these oyster farms.
Then it would serve as like an irritant to the oyster and cover it.
The oyster would cover that bead and then they'd sell it back to you as a cultured pearl.
I was part of the cultured pearl industry.
I wasn't really high paid by any means, but it was a great experience to have.
What I liked about it was The more you put into it, the more you got out of it, similar to what I do now or education or so many things in life.
So it was hard work, but it was good.
I liked it.
How many muscles would you catch in an hour?
I mean, it depends on where you're at.
You know, you're holding on to the bottom with one hand and you're feeling all around with little dish gloves on for the other hand and you'd grab it and you'd put it in a bag till you got You know, sometimes 80 pounds around your neck, but not all of them are alive.
Most of them are dead.
And once they're dead, they kind of blow up.
They're more, you can feel them better because a shell that might be this big or maybe, you know, like the half the side of a football might only stick out a quarter inch out of the mud or substrate sand rock.
So you'd be feeling every little thing you could down there.
It was tough work, but it was great, you know?
It's actually a peaceful place to be most of the time if you're not feeling like the current's too fast.
No cell phones down there.
But, hey, just to throw a shout out for what you guys do.
I know, you know, you're talking about what we do and clean up rivers and garbage.
But, you know, we're focused on the things you can see.
And you guys, Water Keepers, are focusing on the things people can't see.
You know, so I just want to throw a shout out for what you guys do.
And, you know, we're all part of a bigger movement.
And I appreciate you leading the way on all that.
So, you know, I feel like, just to throw this out there, What I do is I don't know if it's sexy, but it's very result-oriented right then.
You get to see your boatloads, your tonnage, your barge loads, you know, and sometimes what you guys are working on takes years and years to do.
And so, you know, the patients and the things you deal with, I just want to throw a shout out and say thanks so much to you and your entire organization for all you guys do.
What's the weirdest thing you ever found underwater?
Do you ever see a car come at you in the current?
So you're talking about when I'm down there?
Either way, if you've got a good story, let's hear it.
Okay, well, the worst thing you can touch underwater is a couch cushion.
Because what do you think a couch cushion feels like?
Like a body.
It feels like a body, you know?
And that always freaked me out.
You would touch one and you'd be like, oh, and you'd move away from it.
But then it would drive you crazy in a pitch black and you'd have to go back and feel it because it would just mentally drive you crazy.
And then you'd figure out it's a couch cushion or something similar.
But the fear was really snapping turtles in the shallower water.
That was always a fear of mine, you know?
And you try to kind of be noisy and We're good to go.
I'm at a cleanup and there's a piece of metal in the bottom of my boat.
It's a wavy day.
I switch boats with somebody and it's bouncing, bouncing, you know, in this thing.
I picked it up.
I thought it was a drill bit for like something you drill through a road or concrete.
So I just threw it back down, whatever.
And long story short is a guy called us and said, Hey, you still have that?
I left that in your boat.
I found out what it was.
It was an artillery shell from the Civil War.
We're like, He's like, can I come get him?
I'm like, yeah, cool.
Come on down.
So then we texted him and said, hey, what'd you ever find out?
Three days later, he's like, well, I basically, the bomb squad, or the cops found out I had this thing.
The bomb squad came and evacuated his entire apartment complex and said as it dried out, it becomes active again.
And basically the text ended with, how was your Monday?
And so that's one of the crazy things.
You find money from bank, not money from bank robberies, but all the bags from bank robbery.
And then I found the surveillance tape back in the early 2000s when they had VHS tapes.
It was wrapped in plastic and duct tape so tight that it never got wet.
So that was crazy.
But You know, guns, grenades.
I mean, honestly, you just never know what you're going to find.
But I have one of the world's largest message in a bottle collections.
It's actually on tour, going to different museums and stuff.
So it's pretty cool to find.
You know, Alec Mathis, and he was the...
He was the second Hudson River keeper, and his first day on the job, he was kayaking around Manhattan, and he was up on the East River, and he found a body in the river.
And he called the police on his cell phone, and had been there a while.
Anyway, he called the police on his cell phone, and they said, push the body to the Brooklyn side.
And so he had to do that job.
And when he got there, they detained him as a witness.
And he was like, I called you guys.
But anyway, it was part of the job.
I found this body up on the south side of Chicago, right around the time that one cop in Chicago had three of his wives had disappeared.
I found this body and they thought it was her and it was crazy.
But we found...
Not quite a few, but a decent amount.
It is what it is.
They don't really affect me all that much.
It just is what it is.
What do you do?
What do you do with all the garbage you get out of the river, Chad?
We try to recycle as much as we possibly can.
We pick up bottles and cans and barge loads of them in certain places.
And so we sort out everything as a crew.
Certain barges are used for different, like one's just a tire barge, you know, and one's just a scrap metal and appliances.
And then we have our plastics and big plastics, small plastics.
But we want to be able to recycle as much as we can.
So what we did is we put on an event called Recycle Like a Rockstar and hired like a DJ and smoke machines and laser beams.
It made it like an event, you know, and like a fun event.
And we can do about 60,000 to 70,000 pounds with 150 people, recycle every bottle and can that comes in is recycled.
And so we try to do as much as we can, not only getting it out of the river, but then doing something with it.
We have one stuff is just for all the toxic chemicals and the batteries and the propane tanks.
You know, that whole section is, we'll hire an environmental company to come in and take them all away and We've done like 5,055 gallon barrels or some number like that, a thousand refrigerators.
And, you know, so it's, it really is an efficient river cleanup operation.
We have like an excavator and cranes and for the big stuff, the cars and boats and it's evolved, but just out of necessity.
And it's a fun deal.
Yeah, I want to again thank you for, not only for everything you do, but for your generosity to the water keepers.
And there's a number of water keepers who have gotten boats from you, boats that you've kind of worn out and, you know, you've been really generous about giving us patrol boats for our work.
Yeah, no, no worries.
Yeah, no, it's no problem at all.
Tennessee Riverkeeper, David.
I mean, that really worked out really well.
And then the one in D.C., I can't remember.
I think Anacostia or the Potomac.
Anacostia.
Totally.
They got one from you.
Yeah.
But if somebody needs it and they don't have the means or it just works out well, it just works.
People are very generous to us, and that's how we do our deal.
And so it's good to return the favor when needed.
You gave Tennessee Riverkeeper a boat, one of your custom-built trash boats that you weren't using.
It's allowed us to remove over 12,000 pounds of trash in Nashville so far and a little over a year.
You've helped so many other groups.
You're very generous and your legacy is not only the trash you've pulled out, but the training and the resources you provide other organizations for their cleanups too.
So I thank you for that.
It's all good.
Again, it's just cool.
It's been a long time since I've seen you, and it's cool to be on your show, man.
It's an honor.
It really is.
Have you ever found a diamond ring or anything of value in the river?
Money?
No, not really.
No, nothing like that.
No, not really.
Driftwood's fun to find, but other than that, it's just a lot of junk, really.
No, not too much, you know?
Oh, I hear you have a fantastic doll collection.
Uh, yes.
I have a whole fence on the barge full of creepy dolls.
That is scary.
Mad Max or, like, Waterworld or one of those deals.
I don't even know how it started.
Somebody just put one up and then it just been growing and, you know, it's just, yes, it is very, they are really creepy, actually.
You know, it's just something interesting for all the students that come here, the people, and try to make it festive and, I guess, Weird to a certain degree, but what it is, the barge is really, they shock people with just how much stuff, the volume of the stuff we're bringing out.
And really, the efficiency of what we do is really what's important too, because to have to get little dumpsters everywhere and all this is just tough to do for where we need to work.
So this thing is, it's cool in so many ways.
So, you've gotten into a new racket recently, I've heard, which is planting trees.
Yeah, not...
I mean, I've been doing it for quite a while.
It started out...
Basically, people think that I see wildlife all the time because I live on the Mississippi River on these islands.
It's normally where we park our barges.
And the truth is, there's not a lot of food for wildlife on a lot of these islands.
Going back, the steamboat era cut all the trees down.
They couldn't use them for fuel until they switched with coal to coal.
Then the trees started growing back up, but then the dams were building and changed the hydrology.
So a lot of the hardwoods that create a lot of food for wildlife, like acorns, they weren't flood tolerant and they could only survive on the higher islands.
They got logged, what have you.
Wasn't seeing much.
So I was just noticing that just void of wildlife because no food.
This one hunting club actually had logged a bunch and I went back and planted some trees.
People heard about it.
They liked it.
I did that on another island.
Another island.
People wanted trees.
I started giving trees away because I couldn't be everywhere.
Turned out, started in a nursery and...
We've given away, I think it's 1 million, or planted, 1,530,000.
I don't know.
We just gave 173,000 out in just the last six weeks or planted them.
So we're, everybody's regrouping and now everybody comes back to the river because we're done with that for the year.
So, you know, trees is leaving a legacy.
Those trees will be growing, creating fruit for wildlife, well beyond my lifetime.
That's a cool thing.
Who doesn't like a tree?
It's good to do.
Tell us about the Bison Bridge.
This is crazy, but I'm going to go with crazy when we're talking about Bison Bridge, right?
I didn't have this idea like this.
I woke up one day and had this idea.
This idea sort of transformed over 20 years.
Literally, around the same time I met you 20-some years ago, I had hired a plane within a year or two of meeting you.
I hired a plane in my hometown and hired a photographer to take me up And fly over Interstate 80 where it crosses the Mississippi River.
It's a very strategic spot.
And it's a quarter mile from where I grew up and where the shop for Living Lands and Waters is.
Anyway, I've always wanted a small herd of bison on the Illinois side.
And the reason being is because...
It's not just any interstate.
It's Interstate 80.
It dead ends downtown Manhattan, or it goes all the way out to San Francisco.
And it's an iconic spot.
You remember if you're driving with your family, crossing the Mississippi River and looking at it for the first time.
It's massive.
And you remember the Rocky Mountains and several other sites along the way.
But the fact was, nobody was stopping.
And I thought, man...
You know, there's 42,000 cars a day traveling over that bridge.
And I thought, you know, people aren't stopping.
Maybe a small herd of bison would because people love wildlife viewing.
So I originally wanted a small herd.
Then about, I started a restoration on five years ago at that strategic spot with a prairie restoration, all this.
Put a lot of money, a lot of time into this.
And then I heard that they're going to build a new bridge in the next five years, and they're going to blow the other one up.
And then it did hit me one day that basically that herd of bison, if you fill the westbound lane with, literally structurally, you could do this, 16 inches of dirt, except for the center span with nine inches of dirt, and you plant your grass, prairie grass.
Those bison literally could eat their way over to Iowa and eat their way back over in Illinois.
This sounds crazy, but you know what?
It needs to be.
Because people will stop.
And it does sound crazy.
Like yesterday, I did an interview from some newspaper in Europe.
I mean, it's really gained a lot of momentum.
I've had 29,000 people in the last, like, 30-some days sign up for it.
I'm trying to start a new national park, which sounds crazy.
But the bison, even though that's the hook and what gets people to stop because it's wildlife, It's really the celebration is the river.
It's crossing the Mississippi River.
And you already have a built-in audience of 42,000 cars that are traveling, plus the local is 400,000 people.
And there's not a national park for hundreds of miles on the river.
And I just think if you have the St.
Louis Arch, that's an arch.
You can have this.
And I'm not building a bridge.
I'm just trying to save it.
Would I waste your time talking about it if it wasn't legitimately going to happen?
I built a team of structural engineers and ex-IDOT, Illinois Department of Transportation folks and lobbyists and all this.
I'm going for it, man.
And financially, I vetted it.
Can I pay for it?
And could I pay for the maintenance of it?
Damn right.
So there's no reason why this thing can't happen.
The only thing I need From your people that are listening right now is people go to bisonbridge.org.
Again, it's bisonbridge.org.
I don't need all your information.
Just sign up.
That's all I need.
I'm not going to hit you up for money.
I just need you to sign up and let the powers that be know that a lot of people think this is a cool idea.
If you don't like it, that's fine, too.
No worries.
There was a lot.
You asked.
Yeah.
Tell me what your vision is for the future, John.
Where do you see it all going?
Well, certainly just making the most of my time.
I really love the aspect of engaging people.
And COVID, we couldn't really do that.
So it's good to get back to some normalcy here and get some events going again and open air.
I think more of the same.
And a lot of times people in organizations are We're business, for that matter.
I think we've got to grow, grow, grow.
And truthfully, it's a very manageable operation.
I can still raise the money and be effective.
And a small group of people, as you know, can have big impacts if you're well-managed and organized and focused.
I would say more of the same.
I guess that's the best answer.
We don't need growth to continue to do good.
That's probably where I would see the organization, just more tonnage and going for, you know, 20 million pounds and those sort of deals and engaging another hundred plus thousand people and going to places that we haven't been and continuing to maintain the momentum that we've built in certain places.
And just, you know, that's the real struggle is to go into new places that really need your help.
I mean, we're working in places in the middle of nowhere, you know, where there are no organizations or Or that sort of deal.
And then, you know, and you go back there and you build up momentum, but you know that there's a lot of other places that need us.
So that's always kind of a struggle, but it is what it is, you know, just balancing that.
But yeah, I'd say more of the same.
And tell us what part of the river you're working on, because Mississippi is a very, very big river.
Right now, we're, like yesterday, you know, there's crews, so the barge is one thing, but then we'll have a crew, like yesterday was up, basically up by Chicago on the Illinois River.
Right now, I'm on the Ohio and Tennessee, and this, we're going to go, just work on the Ohio a lot with the barges and the big stuff, because the Escamator can do a lot here.
And then we'll have two other crews working on the Illinois River.
Basically, from Peoria, Illinois, up to Chicago, which is maybe like a hundred, give or take, mile stretch on that river.
It's a lot easier to work there.
It's just a smaller, more condensed river.
I would say that Ohio is probably one of the dirtiest rivers in the United States, as far as trash and plastics.
I mean, it's unbelievable.
And I know you guys are doing a lot with plastics, and man, it's just...
I would say it'd blow your mind but I know you've seen a lot so it might not blow your mind but most people would blow their minds when they come out here and they just can't believe how much like two of our people this went out they probably got I don't know 2,500 pounds of stuff in the last five hours just two people so that gives you any instance but that's pretty And how can our viewers support you or even better volunteer for you?
I mean, if they live in a place where we're going to work, great.
But I would say don't support us.
Support your local group would be better and volunteer with them.
And if there isn't a group, Doing anything, then start your own, you know, do your own cleanup there.
But I'm not trying to turn down help.
I'll take all I can get, but it's important to, you know, focus on the local.
Because truthfully, like, we come through these places and we work with all these local different organizations, but they're there all the time.
You know, I don't want to be the 800-pound gorilla coming through there and But yeah, I'd say local.
And if you're interested to come out and check us out, please do.
Hit us up.
Email us.
When you talk about local groups, a lot of the local groups you're helping are waterkeeper groups.
They're on those waterways every day, patrolling, cleaning up, tracking down polluters.
I appreciate that plug.
But if people do want to help, Chad, how do they do it?
How do they get you?
How do they find you?
They can go to Living Lands and Waters.
Again, that's livinglandsandwaters.org or look up Mississippi River Cleanup.
We'll pop up on there.
Check us out and we'll take all the help we can get, that's for sure.
But I just want to throw a shout out for the locals again.
Thank you very much for joining me and we will see you on the water.
You bet.
Thanks a lot.
Living Lands and Waters is on social media.
Can you just close with the social medias for Living Lands and Water?
I would if I knew it was.
You have the handles, but you can just say, you know, we're on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
Well, thank you, David.
And I guess we are on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook on Living Lands and Waters.
Yeah, for sure.
No, we're on Living Lands and Waters.
We're on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook.
And I was going to say, thank God for the marketing people.
