WOOD RIVER/ROXANA - Rusty Wheat, the one-man “Chain Gang” who picks up trash along the roads in Wood River and Edwardsville, has officially found his biggest piece of trash yet.
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Over the past two years, Wheat has picked up thousands of pounds of trash along Illinois Route 143. But he was always bothered by a huge Styrofoam block in the middle of a nearby field. On Feb. 11, 2025, Wheat decided he was finally going to do something about it.
“It just seemed like it needed to be gone. That’s it,” he said. “It was just driving me crazy. It’s one of those things that just drives me crazy, and you see it every day. Well, I just came to the conclusion that day that I was going to go take care of it.”
The field is often muddy and difficult to navigate, but on a dry day earlier this month, Wheat parked his truck, put out his normal “Chain Gang” signs, and walked to the middle of the field to survey the Styrofoam block.
He quickly realized it was much bigger than he had anticipated. He couldn’t reach his arms around it to drag it. As he began pushing the block to the side of the road, he found it weighed nearly 150 pounds.
“It took me quite a while and I was exhausted,” he said. “I got it out, but it was so big. I had to set it up on the side of my truck just to take a picture of it to get an idea actually of how big it was.”
He posted the photo on Facebook and received several comments from people who said they’ve noticed that block of Styrofoam in the field for years. Wheat assumed the Styrofoam came from the refinery. He sent a letter to the refinery, and they picked it up.
Wheat is satisfied that the block of Styrofoam has been removed, but to him, it illustrates a larger point about the importance of picking up trash. He believes a lot of people would pick up trash, but they “just get overwhelmed” by the sheer amount of garbage on the side of the road or they believe it’s someone else’s responsibility.
While Wheat encourages people to pick up trash when they can, he also suggests that they can call their local government to report trash on the side of the road. He specifically pointed to public workers as examples of people who should report trash.
“I think the public workers have forgotten that they draw their salary from the public taxes and they work for the public. They work for you and I, so maybe I hold them a little more accountable than I would you,” he explained. “I don’t pay your salary, but I do pay the salary of people that work for the government. So therefore I’m taking a new approach where I’m preaching that it’s time to take responsibility. Public jobs have public responsibility. That’s my method.”
He encourages people to report trash when they see it and do the “little bitty things” to help mitigate the amount of trash that ends up on the side of the roads, such as double-knotting garbage bags before discarding them. Ultimately, he hopes to see a difference in the amount of trash on the roadways in Madison County.
“I can pick up trash for 40 hours a week, but people [need to] realize that they’ve got to come together as a team and report when trash is down,” he said. “I’m not fingerpointing any trash truck or a pedestrian throwing trash, but trash is trash, and we can all do our best to try and get it picked up or reported so that the proper government authorities can get it worked on in time.”
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