Sweet Border Collie Helps Its Owners Tidy Up the Streets by Picking up Over 1,000 Plastic Bottles

Dogs are already superheroes. From sniffing bombs, detecting diseases, seeing ghosts, and telling if a woman is pregnant, the spectrum of a dog’s otherworldly abilities is wide-ranging. But Scruff, a border collie, possesses something far greater than these superhuman powers. He’s a real-life hero. Every day, he ventures out for a walk in the countryside or the woods. When he returns home, he always has a plastic bottle clinging to his mouth. Not that he has a bizarre affinity or obsession for these bottles. Rather, he’s on a mission to save the planet, one plastic bottle at a time, according to a 2022 report by TODAY.

Earlier, it was just his owners who were proud of him, but now, millions of people have become his fans, many of them getting inspired by his sustainable initiative. Dubbed “eco dog” and “Scruffy the Eco Warrior,” Scruff lives in the town of Nuneaton, Warwickshire, in central England, with a couple going by the names Yvonne Faulkner-Grant and her husband, David Grant. He loves long walks and wandering outdoors, even when there are torrents of rain pouring. Whether morning or night, he always has energy for another walk.

Being a handsome border collie, he is also fond of the game of fetch. While his owners toss sticks and bones, he hops around to fetch for them. But as he got older, a doctor advised his master to avoid the games of fetch to prevent his mouth from getting scratched from the inside. But playful as his nature was, he started exploring another project. Each time he was taken for a walk by his owners or by a neighbour, he would pick and collect plastic bottles on the way.

Initially, the behavior seemed to be another of his animal tricks. But then, Grants realized they could use it as an opportunity to collect and recycle waste. Speaking to NPR, they revealed that their neighborhood streets were earlier choked with plastic litter. “We could walk one route one day and go back maybe two days later and do the same route, and there are still bottles that people maybe have chucked out the car window on the side of the road,” David Grant told the outlet.

They didn’t teach Scruff to pick up the plastic bottles. He started doing it all by himself. But as soon as he picked up, he dumped some of them back on the road, which didn’t feel good. "It seemed wrong that he would pick the bottle up and then drop it again - we thought people would think we were dropping litter," Faulkner-Grant shared with the BBC. "We felt guilty leaving them on the floor," Grant said. "People might think that we'd dropped them ourselves."

After some brainstorming, David and Faulkner-Grant designed a plan. Every time they took Scruff on a walk, they would carry a cloth sack. Each time he would pick up a bottle, they would chuck it inside this sack and prevent the street from getting littered again. Over time, they developed a tracker system to prepare a monthly report with the hashtag #scruffsbottlepatrol, in which they would document all the bottles they had picked within a month.

While the black-and-white pooch collected the littered plastic bottles, juice bottles, and soda cans, the pet owners started documenting his project in photos. By the time his mission caught media attention, he had already picked up as many as 1000 bottles. The couple stowed them all in their yard and awaited the next month to add the numbers to their tally records. Fast forward to February 2024, Scruff has passed away, as David reported on Instagram.

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