Meet the internationalstandard ‘plogger’ who’s cleaning up our coastline
DODGY KNEES? p23
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NEWS, VIEWS, TRENDS and ORDINARY RUNNERS doing EXTRAORDINARY THINGS
LUKE DOUGLAS-HOME HAD been plogging long before he was aware that there was such a word, and certainly a long time before he became Britain’s sole entrant in the 2023 World Plogging Championship in Genoa.
‘I think I first heard someone say the word on the Jeremy Vine show about six months ago,’ says the 52-year-old from London. ‘But I’ve been running the coast of Britain collecting plastic for around three years.’ Now Luke’s officially an international-standard plogger, the portmanteau of the Swedish words ‘plocka upp’ (pick up) and ‘jogga’ ( jog) that’s used to describe the act of picking up litter while running. The word appears to have been coined in Sweden around 2016 and the World Plogging Championship is now in its third year since inception.
Over 80 ploggers from 16 countries took part at the end of September 2023, with Spain and Italy proving themselves the top garbage gatherers. Manuel Jesús Ortega García from Andalusia won the men’s competition, earning 368 points calculated through a combination of distance travelled, altitude climbed and CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) collected. Italy’s Elena Canuto won the women’s contest with 115 points. The Serbian Miloš Stanojević sounds like he had the most fun though, winning a special prize for collecting the largest quantity of ‘WEEE’ items (that’s ‘Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment’).
Luke, unfortunately, was disqualified for getting lost in west Genoa and accidentally going outside the perimeter of the race area, but he ended up more than satisfied with his excellent point tally for waste gathering.
By his own admission he isn’t a fast runner, so his strateg y involved attempting to find the kind of rubbish that would score highly. ‘The most valuable thing to find would be something like a car battery,’ he explains. ‘One guy ended up getting three batteries. I had clocked some fly tipping near the start line so banked a lot of valuable waste that way. Then I was occupied trying to move a steel girder, which weighed about half a tonne and would surely have won it, but I couldn’t get it over the line.’
Although it sounds like an enjoyable competition, isn’t it a bit depressing that something like this needs to exist in the first place? ‘It was fun for me, to do something that is slightly crazy but also serious,’ he says. ‘It was great to be around all these switched-on, energetic people, who are in good spirits – which is the effect that running has on you. It does increase your hope that things will get better as more people catch on to it.’
On his regular travels, Lu
