Experience: I’m a world champion litter-picker
SpoGomi is a sport involving litter-picking by teams of three. You’re given an area of roughly 1.5 sq km (0.6 sq miles), and have to collect as much litter as possible within an hour or so, with some items awarded more points than others. Once you’ve collected your litter, you go to the sorting area and have another 20 minutes to sort it into recycling categories. The litter is then weighed. The team with the most points wins.
SpoGomi was invented in Japan in 2008. The name is a combination of “sport” and the Japanese word for rubbish, “gomi”. The first SpoGomi world cup didn’t take place until last year. My brother Stephen stumbled across SpoGomi in São Paulo, where he lives. I heard about the sport from him in May last year. The UK SpoGomi competition was scheduled for August, with the world cup in Tokyo in November. I had just a few months to form my team. Initially we were drawn to taking part because of the prize of a trip to Japan.
My teammates are my partner, Alex Winship, and his brother Jonny. We only came up with our team name, The North Will Rise Again, on the morning of the tournament in London. All of us are from either the north of England or Scotland, and we took it from a book Jonny was reading at the time. We keep ourselves fit: I’ve run more than 30 marathons; Jonny plays football; and Alex is the strongest – during competitions he’s loaded up like a carthorse.
We won the UK competition by only 33 points, which is equivalent to just one glass bottle
One of the rules is that all the members of a team have to stay within 10 metres of each other. It’s noisy and tensions are running high, so you have to have really good communication skills. Also, you’re not allowed to run, but speed-walking is allowed.
There were about 20 teams in the UK competition, which took place in London’s Hackney marshes. We won by only 33 points, which is equivalent to just one glass bottle.
We were then heading for the world cup. In Tokyo I saw my brother, who was the captain of the Brazilian team, for the first time in two years. We were staying in the same hotel. That night, my team used a tactic we’d learned from my brother: doing a recce of the competition area, which was in the busy commercial Shibuya district.
As we walked around that night, we thought about the profile of people who drop litter: probably typically younger people or people who were drinking. That helped us narrow down where to go. So we made note of areas with lots of bars. Another advantage was that we were on the younger and physically fit end of the spectrum. The UK teams tend to like the competitive element of the sport, whereas people from other countries are motivated more by environmental interests.
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Because of jetlag and nerves, I barely slept the night before. With 21 nations competing, the world cup involved two 45-minute rounds of litter-picking in Shibuya. The competition was intense. At one point, the members of another team came over to us and tried to pick rubbish out of our bag.
After the first half, Japan came top, we were second and the Brazilian team were third. My muscles were aching and I felt completely exhausted from the heat of Tokyo on a sunny day. I didn’t have much more energy, and I remember Alex and Jonny saying the same, but we had this feeling of being on the edge of something amazing. We had to just keep pushing.
We pulled ahead in the second half because we discovered an area no one else had been to. We ended up coming first, ahead of Japan, with 57kg (9st) of rubbish collected.
The prize for winning the world cup was being invited back for the next one, in 2025. We’ll definitely be there, and another of my brothers now wants to compete. Before then, we are trying to raise awareness of the sport in the UK.
I wouldn’t have been someone who would have picked up litter off the street before. At the early stages of our training, we were so bad at finding litter. Then, just after the London competition, on the way home, we saw so much. We were just much more aware of it. Once you’re drawn into SpoGomi, your attitude towards litter and how you contribute completely changes – it certainly has for us.
As told to Christine Ro
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