Every holiday, while many people head outdoors to relax, Gao Wei, a bank employee in North China's Hohhot city, shoulders his woven sack and walks into the mountains in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, not to hike for fun, but to pick up trash. Photo: web

Every holiday, while many people head outdoors to relax, Gao Wei, a bank employee in North China's Hohhot city, shoulders his woven sack and walks into the mountains in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, not to hike for fun, but to pick up trash.

For more than 10 years, Gao has turned his weekends and holidays into environmental missions, collecting plastic bottles, cans, barbecue skewers, and other litter from trails, grasslands and rivers. The locals call him "cleaner of the Daqin Mountain." 

Gao started in October 2015 after seeing plastic bottles strewn along a mountain path. Since then, he carried a sack whenever he goes outdoors and always picked up any waste he sees. What began as a spontaneous act has evolved into a long-term personal commitment.

By October 25, 2025, Gao had collected 103,982 drink containers, including 71,322 plastic bottles,116,100 barbeque skewers and nearly 4,400 pounds of other waste, more than 23,800 pounds in total.

Gao records his clean-up trips and post them online. He said that he wants more people to see how litter hurts the nature from the pictures and videos he posts and remind them to protect the nature.