A 33-year-old woman became an internet sensation by exposing the dark side of corporate waste, and she's parlaying that fame into making a real difference in New York City and beyond.
According to Nice News, Anna Sacks, better known as "the Trash Walker," started going viral on TikTok and other social media after posting videos showing her picking through the garbage bags that littered New York streets.
Sacks was an investment banker but quit in 2017 and took a farming fellowship for three months.
"My career journey has been guided in part by trying to find something that has felt inherently meaningful," Sacks told Nice News. "I was working at an investment bank doing mergers and acquisition and capital raises. And that work, there wasn't a very strong 'why' for why I was doing it."
When she returned to New York, she found herself much more aware of the trash and waste around her.
"I started paying attention to all the things that we were tossing and the waste of the curb, and becoming very curious about it and going through it," she said.
Sacks' early videos focused heavily on trash from normal folks, but as time went on, she started to call out corporate waste even more, highlighting how many clothes and goods were being pitched by companies without being sold.
That hard work has paid big dividends for Sacks. She's currently the legislative chair for the Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board, where she's helped to get residents of all five boroughs access to curbside pickup for composting materials and is working to get state legislation through that would hold companies accountable for issues in their supply chains, ranging from human rights abuses to environmental concerns and chemical misuse.
But Sacks isn't done there. She wants to help cut down waste from lunches in New York City schools and build more support for community programs to help them be more environmentally conscious.
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Definitely 😠"That's one of the things that I think is really important about local climate solutions," Sacks said. "It does both: It builds a better world through climate mitigation and climate resiliency and also through building local community."
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