Trek. Collect. Respect.

CleanTrek introduces the world's first (patent pending) trekking pole attachments that turn your poles into litter cleanup tools.

The Grabber

screws onto the bottom of your trekking pole. Push the Trigger to rotate the Grabber and pick up litter.

The Tongs Holder

can be used alongside your Collector, enabling a single-pole litter cleanup solution.

Now taking pre-orders!

After a successful Kickstarter with over 400 backers and $65k+ raised, manufacturing is underway! Pre-order now to get your own CleanTrek kit from our first manufacturing run (est. Spring 2027)!

CleanTrek is a grassroots company, run independently by the inventor (me) John McShane. I'm eager to get these tools out on the trails, and every pre-order helps me make that happen!

The 2026 report from Keep America Beautiful estimates that 35 billion pieces of litter line US roadways, waterways, and coastal areas, with 84% of litter measuring 4 inches or less [1]. With 350 million US residents in 2026, each person would only have to pick up 100 pieces of litter to eliminate all of it.

Yosemite National Park gets about 4 million visitors per year [2]. If each visitor filled just one CleanTrek Collector (1.5 liters each), that litter could be piled into a 5ft x 5ft column as tall as Half Dome itself! That's the volume equivalent of roughly 4,738 queen-size mattresses stacked on top of each other. How long would it take to pick all that up by yourself?

Yosemite Facelift is the largest annual litter cleanup event across all US national parks. In 2023, 1,501 volunteers dedicated 12,151 hours across 5 days to remove a whopping 10,432 lbs of litter from Yosemite National Park [3]. Astoundingly, this represents just 0.023% of the total hours spent by visitors at Yosemite that year. Imagine if just 1% of all visitors cleaned up litter while exploring the park—that'd be equivalent to 43 Facelift events!

The way I see it, we have hundreds of thousands of hikers on the trails at any given moment. Give each hiker the tools to take action, and we have the potential to be a massive, 24/7 litter cleanup operation! And it doesn't take much. Imagine committing to picking up just 1 out of every 100 pieces of litter you spot, knowing that the 99 hikers behind you will do the same. All of a sudden, your small action doesn't seem so small anymore.

Litter accumulates gradually. One person drops a candy wrapper. A gust of wind blows a napkin off a picnic table, etc. So shouldn't our approach to cleaning litter be gradual, too? Shouldn't we pick it up as early as possible, before it has a chance to embed itself into nature? All we need to do is remove litter more quickly than we create it, and with the right tools, I believe that's possible.

Sources:

[1] Keep America Beautiful. (2026, May). 2026 National Litter Study.

[2] National Park Service. (2023). Monthly Public Use Report for Yosemite National Park.

[3] Yosemite Climbing Association. (2023). Yosemite Facelift 20th Anniversary. (click here for info about Facelift events!)