Daniel Toben was a student at North Carolina State University and saw a stream near his dorm that was filled with plastic bottles. He asked out loud, "why doesn't someone do something about this filth?"
His room mate said "you're someone".
That changed his perspective. He was going to be the change. That day after class he went down to the stream and started collecting the empty bottles. Now he is 31 years old and loves cleaning beaches, roadsides the woods, etc.
Since then, all my free time – away from my job managing a sandwich shop in Chapel Hill – has been spent finding new ways to organize my clean-ups. I use a downloadable phone application called Fulcrum that tracks every location I and volunteers clean. I track the location, the number of bags collected and take pictures to show the impact.
Over the past 2 years he's filled over 7000 bags of trash! You can follow Daniel's adventures on his Facebook page the Earth Stewards.
And remember the next time you ask why someone hasn't done something that the community needs, you're someone.