Ten minutes. That’s how much time Melanie Knight factors into her daily plog.
Plogging — a new trend — is the combination of jogging and picking up garbage.
Knight has combined her love of exercise and the environment to become a plogger.
“It is easy to pick up litter and then continue on my run,” Knight, who is a marine biologist, told Global News.
She’s taking an optimistic approach.
“Sometimes I think, ‘Did someone throw the litter on the ground?'” she says. “’Or did it get blown out of the garbage can?’”
Global’s Robin Gill joined her on one run to find out how much she gets in her “10-minute tidy,” as she calls it.
She filled a whole bag.
The plogging phenomenon began in Sweden.
Now, people around the world are vlogging and blogging about plogging.
Even Iceland’s president has gotten in on the action.
“We saw all this on Twitter and thought, ‘We do this anyways. We didn’t know there was a name attached to it,” says Rachel Schoeler.
Schoeler is part of the Great Canadian Shoreline. The national organization has been plogging for 25 years and didn’t know it.
Last year, 60,000 people made it their civic duty to take part in cleaning up garbage in communities across Canada to make sure no trash ended up in the ocean.
“We removed 1.2-million kilograms of waste over the last 25 years,” she says. “Every bit makes a difference.”
Melanie Knight started plogging as a 30-day challenge — and then just kept going.
“It’s addictive,” she admitted.
It only takes 10 minutes and she can continue with her run. And until that ocean is clean, she’ll keep plogging away.