MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
There's a man in Florida with a weird hobby. OK, (laughter) probably quite a few men in Florida with weird hobbies. But setting that aside, we're going to focus on one who pulls trash out of Miami's mangrove forests, trash that floats in the oceans or is dumped there. This is part of our series Here to Help. Catherine Welch followed him one day on his pursuit of trash.
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CATHERINE WELCH, BYLINE: Just past the dumpster, at the edge of a fire station parking lot, Andrew Otazo ducks under some branches and disappears into the thick of a hardwood hammock. He pushes through the lush landscape with a trash picker in one hand and a black garbage bag in the other.
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WELCH: Miami is Otazo's hometown. He spent much of his childhood exploring the miles and miles of the swampy ecosystems along the coast known for the mangrove trees.
ANDREW OTAZO: You've got these big arching roots called prop roots that extend from the trunk. And it looks like they're walking across the land or the water.
WELCH: When Otazo returned to Miami after college, he went back to exploring the mangroves and told his girlfriend how heartbroken he was to find so much trash.
OTAZO: She just said, why don't you do something about this? Why don't you start picking this up? And I was like, no, there's no point.
WELCH: After thinking about it, he realized she was right.
OTAZO: And that was 10 years ago. That was 43,000 pounds ago.
WELCH: Forty-three thousand pounds of trash that washed into the forest through floods and tides, or just from people illegally dumping junk, like this rusty engine peeking out of the ground.
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WELCH: It's heavy. And after some yanking, he rolls it out into the parking lot.
OTAZO: (Laughter).
WELCH: It's just one of the many unusual things he's cleared out of the landscape.
OTAZO: Mattresses, furniture, lots and lots and lots of tires, ovens, microwaves, lots of clothing, lots of underwear for some reason.
WELCH: All of this he catches on video and posts on his social media.
OTAZO: I have to upload content of me doing this crazy stuff so people stop and go, why is that guy rolling an engine block out of the mangroves?
WELCH: He wants to get them motivated to do the same. When Otazo is not picking up trash, he promotes environmental causes and advocates for ecosystems like this one...
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WELCH: ...Where he's now yanking out four old tires.
OTAZO: This is a great workout. I've moved 1,050 pounds today. Come on.
WELCH: And the county benefits. Loren Parra heads Miami-Dade's environmental department. She cracks a smile as she tries to come up with a price tag for Otazo's volunteer work.
LOREN PARRA: I know that that would be several full-time employees that we could dedicate exclusively just to picking up trash along our waterways.
WELCH: And Otazo knows from experience that the work of picking up trash in the mangroves is never done.
OTAZO: Because it's me screaming, metaphorically, at the universe that I don't care how hard this is, how impossible it seems. I'm not going to just sit back and do nothing. I'm going to do something, at the very least.
WELCH: And he says, as long as the trash keeps coming, so will he. For NPR News, I'm Catherine Welch in Key Biscayne, Florida.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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