Waste Removal Services Get a Helping Hand from a Swedish Trend – Plogging:

At Junk2Go, we know that waste removal can be a serious workout, particularly when heavy inorganics such as furniture and appliances are involved.  Then again, rubbish collection is what we do – most people tend to think of exercising and picking up rubbish as separate enterprises. Or at least they did until Sweden entered the picture.

The Swedish have already been doing quite an impressive job of keeping things tidy – as we mentioned in our article on Top Waste Collection Services from Around the World, Sweden manages to keep almost all of its waste out of landfills through a combination of recycling and using rubbish as an alternative source of heating to fossil fuels. Nevertheless, some of it must still have ended up as litter in parks and on streets, inspiring an innovative solution from local running enthusiasts – plogging.

Plogging, a new coinage, is a mashup of jogging and the Swedish phrase plocka upp meaning to pick up. The idea was simple: pick up rubbish while you jog. The exercise trend started as an little-known idea amongst joggers, but really took off after people started posting on social media under the hashtag #plogging.

All plogging requires is a bag and (ideally) some gloves. It can be built in runs along one trail or be used by joggers who run multiple laps around the same area – the first lap can be used as a warmup/general scout for any waste lying around, then the rubbish collection can take place on subsequent laps.

Environmentalists in America heard about the trend, and decided that promoting plogging in the US could help with their cleanup aims. The nonprofit Keep America Beautiful decided to work together with Swedish health tracking app Lifesum in order to raise awareness of plogging in the US. Keep America Beautiful soon learned from their affiliates that variants of plogging were already popular in places – in Tennessee, an event called ‘Trashercize’ was already being held, where participants would gather and do a local trash cleanup at the same time.

The beauty of plogging lies in its ability to become an exercise routine rather than a one-off event, even if, as the Spokesmen for Keep America Beautiful, Mike Rosen, suggests, you only need to “turn your jog into a plog once a week or once a month”. The untapped cleanup potential of plogging becomes clear when one considers that, according to Statista, over 64 million people in the US in 2016 used jogging or running as a form of exercise. And for the serious runners among them who fear that the odd plog might impact the quality of their training, Lifesum has data to suggest the exact opposite. While thirty minutes of jogging burns 235 calories on average, jogging combined with picking up trash will burn 288. This is because of the combination of bending – similar to squats – and arm strength – carrying the rubbish – which plogging involves.

If jogging is already your workout of choice, or if you’ve been thinking that it would be a good idea to get out and about more, it’s hard not to see the benefits of plogging, and there’s no doubt that New Zealand’s green spaces would benefit from the cleanup if we were to see plogging take off here.

Some waste removal jobs, however, are best left to the experts. If you’ve got some junk that really needs removing, don’t hesitate to ring JUNK2GO on 0800 586 524 today.