Have you noticed hikers hauling trash as they wander up the mountain? How about joggers carrying plastic bottles on their morning runs?

If you haven’t yet spotted signs of the latest health craze, it’s just a matter of time. Welcome to plogging, the hot fitness trend in Sweden that is now gaining steam in the U.S. The word plogging is a mashup of jogging and the Swedish term for “picking up” which is “plocka up.” In the age of global environmental crises, the practice is starting to attract people who want to do something good for the planet while they do something good for themselves, like exercise.

In a progressive region like the Bay Area, it stands to reason plogging would be all the rage as Earth Day approaches. It was a no-brainer for Nancy Fong, who started plogging last spring after she got tired of all the litter strewn on her running path. She’s thrilled that more people are going after garbage.

“I always felt like a weirdo who picked up trash while jogging or walking the dog,” says Fong, a freelance writer who often plogs with her pooch.

The San Jose mother of two says she first got inspired by her son, who was a Boy Scout, and a trip to Yosemite that coincided with its annual fall cleanup.

“Volunteers descend on the park and pick up trash. At the end, they weigh it all and celebrate,” she says. “I thought why not year-round at my local trail?”

Fong now cleans up everywhere she goes, from hiking trails to kid’s sports events, where she often picks up straws, Mylar balloons and plastic lids.

“Week after week, I would recognize the same piece of trash,” she says. “Finally I just picked it up because I was sick of seeing it.”

Fong, an avid runner and biker, says the hardest part will be changing the way people think about the role they play in keeping litter at bay.

“It’s changing people’s mindset that this is their neighborhood and picking up trash that is an eyesore is everyone’s responsibility.”

Fong encourages those who are squeamish about picking up trash to start with things that seem less icky. “Even if you pick up cleaner trash, like stuff that has been baked by the sun’s UV rays, that would help.”

As an added bonus, plogging helps boost your workout because it makes you add squats to your activity. According to the Swedish-based fitness app Lifesum, which helps users track their plogging, a half-hour of jogging plus picking up trash will burn 288 calories. That’s a bump up from just 235 by jogging alone. So you can rid yourself of those pesky pounds while you rid the world of rubbish.

Certainly, Fong, who has since inspired other friends to follow in her footsteps, believes that ploggers can make a real impact on the ecology of our region.

“Even if we could get a small dedicated group to do it regularly, like we exercise, we could make a difference,” she says. “We could catch stuff before it rolled into storm drains, for example, and out into the ocean.”