'Plogging' is a Swedish fitness trend that combines running with picking up litter
Forget about Hygge, Lagom, and Ikea's attempt to start a twin duvet revolution. There's a new Scandinavian trend in town.
This trend encourages people to pick up litter while out running. So, it's not just good for your health, it's also good for the environment.
It's called 'plogging'—a portmanteau of jogging and the Swedish plocka upp, meaning 'pick up.'
So hot is this new trend that fitness app Lifesum is allowing its users to log and track their plogging activity as a workout.
Plogging combines going for a run with intermittent squatting or lunging (to collect rubbish), which actually sounds like a pretty satisfying workout. According to Lifesum, a typical user will burn 288 calories in 30 minutes of plogging, which is more or less the same as what's burned off while jogging.
As with all fitness trends, there are plenty of #plogging pics on Instagram, offering a glimpse of what this trend looks like IRL. Ploggers take plastic bags along with them so they can store the collected litter they find along their route.
Swedish fitness app Lifesum claims it's the first health app to allows its 25 million users to log their plogging activity. Those using the health app can log plogging as a fitness activity, in the same way that they would log running or walking, and the app will estimate how many calories have been burned.
Lifesum has also teamed up with the non-profit Keep America Beautiful to provide an online resource for ploggers who want to log the rubbish they've collected.
Mike Rosen, senior vice president at Keep America Beautiful, thinks plogging is a great way to encourage people to make a difference in their local environment.
"Plogging is brilliant because it is simple and fun, while empowering everyone to help create cleaner, greener and more beautiful communities," Rosen said in a statement. "All you need is running gear and a bag for trash or recyclables, and you are not only improving your own health, but your local community too."
Plog away!
Topics Health
Rachel Thompson is the Features Editor at Mashable. Rachel's second non-fiction book The Love Fix: Reclaiming Intimacy in a Disconnected World is out now, published by Penguin Random House in Jan. 2025. The Love Fix explores why dating feels so hard right now, why we experience difficult emotions in the realm of love, and how we can change our dating culture for the better.
A leading sex and dating writer in the UK, Rachel has written for GQ, The Guardian, The Sunday Times Style, The Telegraph, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Stylist, ELLE, The i Paper, Refinery29, and many more.
Rachel's first book Rough: How Violence Has Found Its Way Into the Bedroom And What We Can Do About It, a non-fiction investigation into sexual violence was published by Penguin Random House in 2021.
