Indian student leads 'plogging' missions to clean up streets across UK

An Indian student and award-winning environmentalist from the University of Bristol in south-west England has inspired a trend of plogging, or jogging combined with litter picking, across various cities of the UK.

Vivek Gurav, originally from Pune, was inspired by the Swedish concept of plogging which combines jogga (jogging) with plocka upp (a pick-up) to encourage people who use their local streets the most to take pride in keeping them clean.

In India, he set up a plogging community known as Pune Ploggers back in 2018, with over 10,000 members who have collected over 1 million kilograms of rubbish and wanted to continue the trend when he took up his scholarship position at Bristol University in September last year. Since then, his university says he has covered over 420 miles on 120 plogging missions joined by volunteers from 180 countries and is now taking the drive to 30 UK cities.

I have only been plogging in Bristol but I kept getting asked by people in Manchester, Leeds, .