Keeping To A Japanese Theme,

for some reason I was not surprised to read this,

photograph Mick Haupt/Unsplash, in Japan there is a National sport, called SpoGomi, it is a combination of ‘sport’ and ‘gomi’ (Japanese for rubbish), the basic premise is that teams away from roads in use and railway tracks pick up litter competing against other teams, each team of three players will have 60 minutes to gather the most trash from a designated area while trying to sort it correctly into color-coded bags for each type (burnable waste, recyclable plastic, metal cans, etc.). When the time is up, the trash will be weighted and checked for proper sorting, and the team with the most trash wins. In case of a tie, the winner is determined by the quality of the trash, also like some other games extra points are added, for instance in Scrabble extra points are added for difficult letter to use, in SpoGomi cigarette butts are the high scoring item, 

back to the game, Japan invented SpoGomi and has been holding local contests since 2008. The new sport caught on very fast, and today hundreds of competitions are organized every year,  

and now there is the inaugural SpoGomi World Cup, teams from other counties have been invited to enter, “We believe it is important to collect litter in cities because there has been a sharp increase in the amount of waste in oceans around the world, so it is best if we can collect that trash before it gets into the ocean as it is much harder to gather at that point,” said Takayasu Udagawa, who is overseeing the first SpoGomi World Cup, as it happens I might put a small bet on who will win, but what a great idea, if only it would catch on here in the UK!