With garbage bags, a handheld scale and a trash picker tool in hand, Matthew Edwards is trying to make a difference in his own life and the lives of Calgarians.
Over three years, Edwards has hauled more than 16,000 kilograms of trash from parks, riverbanks, roadsides and neighbourhoods across the city.
For Edward’s, it’s less about municipal maintenance than it is about self-healing and human dignity.
“Three years ago, I was looking for a job and I wasn’t having much luck looking for one. And I just decided to myself one day, ‘Go out and make your own positivity,’” said Edwards.
“There was an area near my house that was always just littered with trash and I thought, ‘Let’s go out there and clean it up.’”
In the summer of 2023, Edwards took his first steps into community clean up after finding a patch of grass near East Calgary’s Marlborough Mall littered with trash. Soon after, he started posting before and after photos to his social media.
Comments flooded in, thanking him and giving Edwards suggestions on what areas he should visit next.
Edwards is three years sober from alcohol following a seven-year substance abuse disorder.
“Getting sober was kind of, you know, I describe it like the TV screen went from foggy to crisp and it’s like now I realize what’s important in life,” he said.
In the winter of 2025, Edwards was living at the Mustard Seed, but rather than pausing his mission, he doubled down.
“I realized I didn’t need much anymore,” Edwards said. “Money kind of just complicates the world. It complicates my life personally, and I didn’t really need much. I became homeless and I realized I just had a phone bill and a bus pass, and that was about it.”
When community members started offering Edwards donations to support his work, he redirected the cash to the Alberta Children’s Hospital through his Cleaning for Kids: A 30 Day City Challenge.
Throughout the challenge, Edwards gathered volunteers and partnered with Keep the Earth Fresh Calgary to raise $2,840 for the Children’s Hospital. At two-years-old Edwards was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune blood disorder. Specialized care saved his life and he wanted to give back.
Now living in transitional housing, Edwards continues weighing each bag with a handheld scale and posting videos online. His sights on his next goal: 100,000 pounds of collected waste.
“What I do is kind of, you know, it’s environmentalism in a way, but I’m more trying to combat apathy for everybody,” Edwards said.
To those who view his tireless drive as unrealistic, Edwards offers a steady challenge.
“They see my optimism as delusion and then I see their negativity as delusion, and it’s like… One of us is wrong,” he said. “So, I will live over here in my delusion trying to make the world a better place, because I know in fact I do make the world a better place.”