Tyler Boden doesn’t consider himself a hero. But then, heroes seldom do.

Growing up in Elsinore Heights, Chrislip’s ritziest neighborhood, 16-year-old Tyler never gave much thought to the plight of his fellow man. Like most children of privilege, he didn’t think much beyond which video game to play next or which member of the household staff to hector.

That all changed a few months ago when Tyler looked out the front window on a cold autumn night and saw a homeless man rooting through the Boden family’s garbage can, looking for food. It’s a sight familiar to most Elsinore residents, who like to brag that they throw out more food before 9 AM than most people eat all day. But this time, something clicked inside Tyler. He didn’t just want to do something, he had to do something. From that point on he was a kid possessed. He organized rummage sales and fun runs. He sold raffle tickets. And within two months, every household in his neighborhood had a state-of-the-art lock-top garbage receptacle.

The Garbage Can’t™ employs the same locking-screw technology that Eastern European asylums use to keep crazy orphans in their hidey-holes. And if it can do that, it can most certainly keep the homeless and other raccoons out of our garbage.

Tyler hopes that other young people will follow his example. “It’s not that hard to change the world,” he says. “I mean, I saw a starving man scavenging in our garbage for a scrap of food, and four words popped into my head: ‘Hey, that’s not yours’. And then I resolved to do something about it. It was just that simple.”