Waste Management employees donate 107 bikes for kids in need

PINELLAS PARK (FOX 13) - A Pinellas County Waste Management employee is on a mission to bring smiles to the faces of 100 kids this Christmas and he’s already exceeded his goal.

Tyrone Shivers has been a Waste Management truck driver for more than 13 years – and he has a heart of gold. He's using trash trucks in a powerful way.

He said he was sitting around, thinking about what he could do to help kids.

 “Thinking about when I was young, I wanted a bike. You can ride up to the store, up a hill, do everything with a bike, ride to school," Shivers said.

So he came up with a plan: Gather as many bikes as he could and donate them to kids who need them.

He wanted to ask each employee at Waste Management to donate a bike and he was amazed by the response.

107 bikes came rolling in from his teammates, but it didn’t stop there. Pinellas Park firefighters have been doing toy drives for 15 years. They will help distribute the bikes, but also helped gather more, bringing the total up to 121.

"Wonderful, wonderful, yes, because every year we get new families that need bikes, and we'll definitely be able to move them," Pinellas Park Fire Department’s Jason Pickett said. " The bikes are going to the families in the area, in Pinellas Park and Kenneth City, and they're families that we get through an application process. We do from little to all the way up."

Meanwhile, Shivers and his team gathered the bikes in a safe spot, showcasing just how many they were able to collect. They filled two empty dumpsters with all the donated bikes.

"I've never had this many bikes,” Pickett said. “I've never thought of having this many bikes for our Christmas giveaway. We usually only have 25-ish, that we have to usually buy, but this is wonderful. We'll be able to give most kids a bike. There's a lot of parents that can't afford stuff like this, so they really appreciate it as well."