PARIS (red.) – The Parisian street sweeper Ludovic Franceschet is fed up with people throwing garbage on the floor in the COVID-19 pandemic.
The 45-year-old has become an unlikely hit in youth culture in France. Time-lapse videos show how he cleans up piles of trash, dances and calls people from the heart to keep the planet clean.
His TikTok account has 59,000 followers, 608,000 “likes” and some of the videos he has posted have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
When Franceschet was working his way around the Les Halles district in central Paris on Thursday with a broom and handcart, a young man broke off his fast-food lunch and asked, “Are you the TikTok guy?”
Franceschet said that from the age of seven he picked up cigarette butts from the family garden and paper bags from the street.
Previously, he worked as a caregiver for cancer patients and autistic adults. But he said garbage disposal was his real calling. “My dream is simply to have a clean planet,” he told red.
He works seven hour shifts and after tax is paid around 1,500 euros per month, he said.
In the pandemic, eating in restaurants and cafes is banned, so many people come to take away. This has led to an increase in the volume of rubbish on the street – and more work for Franceschet.
His journey into TikTok fame began when he realized that just picking up the trash was not enough and he had to educate young people about their civic duty.
“I made videos,” he said. “It’s got 100 likes, I said, ‘Wow, let’s try to go further.’ And then I realized it was reaching the younger generation. “
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