Chandigarh: Pick litter as you jog
Chandigarh, June 10
Plogging is trending in the City Beautiful with the new push of the Municipal Corporation (MC), “clean as you jog”, gradually catching on in which joggers pick up garbage as they run to save the environment.
Commemorating Environment Week from June 5 to 11, today, Mayor Sarbjit Kaur kickstarted the plogging initiative in the Mani Majra area during which a group of local residents, MC officials and around 20-25 fitness enthusiasts and morning walkers, carrying jute bags and wearing gloves in their hands, jogged and picked up trash along their jogging tracks inside the garden and road berms.
Speaking on the new initiative, the Mayor said plogging was a new concept that was trending the city and was an environment-friendly exercise that combined jogging with environmental benefits of picking up trash. While jogging helped people stay fit, collecting trash from gardens and roadsides helped the environment cause, she added.
She said the activity helped people burn some extra calories as they were constantly bending to collect trash along the route. It also helped break the monotony of jogging. Unaware of the new initiative and oblivious to what was going on around, some morning walkers in the Mamimajra area were taken by surprise when they spotted joggers along the tracks picking up trash and storing it in a waste bag, said the Mayor.
Anindita Mitra, MC Commissioner, started plogging in the new lake area in Sector 42, where Jasbir Singh, area councillor, and members of the Residents Welfare Association, along with NGO volunteers, joined for plogging.
The Commissioner said the aim was not to collect huge quantities of trash or cleaning the entire gardens or roadsides and make it free of garbage, but was just a new form of exercise coupled with a simple effort to save the environment. She said such activities would be carried out every weekend to start with. Later, it would be expanded to all parks and throughout the week when citizens from all parts of the city would join in.
She said plogging was a healthy exercise as it involveed variation in body movement like bending, stretching and squatting alongside, of course, running. As it also beautified the city, its dual benefits were worth vouching for, said the Commissioner.
The Commissioner urged city residents to stop throwing garbage on roadsides and littering gardens.
During the activity, the team collected all sorts of trash and garbage, including gutka packets, chips packets, water bottles, cigarette butts, discarded bottles and ice-cream sticks.
In other parts of the city too, area councillors and local residents participated in plogging activities in which they picked up discarded plastic bottles and empty polythene packets and dropped these in dustbins.
Dual benefit
Mayor Sarbjit Kaur said plogging was a new concept that was trending the city and was an environment-friendly exercise that combined jogging with environmental benefits of picking up trash. While jogging helped people stay fit, collecting trash from gardens and roadsides helped the environment cause, she said.
