URBANA, Ill. - Jim Payne is a one-man recycling program.
He walks the streets each morning, as he has for 25 years, sifting through your trash for the treasures within.
Like a brand-new vacuum cleaner, still in the box. Microwave ovens. Unopened boxes of laundry soap, A perfectly good computer printer/scanner. A six-pack of beer. And those are just the recent finds.
Payne is not homeless, or even poor. He owns a small manufacturing firm and lives with his wife, Mare, in a charming brick duplex with a yard bursting in colorful prairie plants.
Payne is waging a private crusade to stop the Earth or at least his corner of Champaign-Urbana from becoming the desolate, trash-strewn planet.
Courtesy of ChicagoTribune.com
