BURLINGTON, Conn. -- A former West Hartford police officer turned minister and his youngest son haven taken on the mission of cleaning one Connecticut town of its littered trash.

Kurt Satherlie said that during his daily four-mile runs in Burlington, he noticed mass amounts of trash littered on the side of the road.

Satherlie said that the trash began to increasingly bother him, so he decided, with the help of his youngest son Brent, to do something about it.

"From a vehicle, it's hard to see the garbage on the road, but when you're running, it's right in front of you. It bothered me enough over time to say, 'You know, it's going to be here unless I do something about it,'" Satherlie said.

Satherlie and his son use a John Deere mower to drive alongside the rural Burlington roads, picking up trash as they go.

"I believe that God gives us this natural beauty that surrounds us, and if you believe differently, that's fine, but we're still on the same Earth and share the same Earth, and that we should leave it the same way we found it or make it better," Satherlie said.

The father and son team said they find all kinds of things tossed along the town's roads.

"Mostly soda cans, beer cans, a lot of water bottles … cigarette packs. We've also found tires, head rests from cars, lights from motorcycles that we've picked up maybe way back in the woods that have been there for many, many years," he said.

"From a vehicle, it's hard to see the garbage on the road, but when you're running, it's right in front of you. It bothered me enough over time to say, 'You know, it's going to be here unless I do something about it,'" -- Kurt Satherlie Burlington

Satherlie said the scary part of his thankless job is finding the beer cans littering the roads.

"You just really wonder what people are doing out there with the drinking and why they just can't wait to get home," Satherlie said.

Before becoming a minister, Satherlie said he was a member of the West Hartford police force for over 20 years.

Channel 3's Scot Haney asked Satherlie why he thought that people litter.

"I wish I had the answer to that Scot, because it floors me," Satherlie answered. "Why not wait five minutes? If you're going to have it in your car, drinking a coffee or whatever, it's in the car for 10 or 15 minutes. You can wait another two to hopefully throw it out, so I don't know."

While Satherlie might never know the reasoning behind people's littering, he said he knows he can do something about it. He encouraged people to use trash cans and to pick up litter as they come across it.

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