Trail Cleaning is a great way to contribute to tackling the plastic pollution crisis locally, but did you know that it can also boost your mental and physical health?
This year, WildStrong served as a Community Hub for Trash Free Trails. We organised five trail cleans along the Fife coastline, and here’s what we learned.
It's May, and although there's still a chill in the air, the sun is shining. For the first time in months, we're walking this part of the Fife coastline. The terrain here is rocky, with linear formations stretching out to sea; at low tide, they look like a series of slanting tidal pools. The children are ahead of us, building a den out of driftwood and hiding behind huge boulders. In the summer, we head toward the sandy beaches, spending hours swimming, constructing elaborate dams in the small burns that flow across the sand, and searching for life in the rock pools. In winter, we walk the coastal path. It's stunning yet barren, with a wind that goes straight to your bones. As a teenager, I used to imagine that Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca took place here, rather than in Cornwall as she claimed. If you're familiar with the area, the bay near Randerston Farm is the one I always imagined as the setting for Rebecca’s cottage.
Family trail cleaning seemed like the perfect opportunity to spend more time exploring the rocky parts of the coastline that we often bypass on our way to the sandy beaches. We’re always looking for ways to spend time outdoors with our children, and they tend to walk much farther when they’re with a group of friends. So, organizing a series of trail cleans for families from the local schools checked a lot of boxes for us.
Over the summer, we organised five meetups and collected a total of 25 bags. It was a great way to spend more time outside, meet new people, and help clean up the coastline that we all cherish. A mind-spinning two million pieces of single-use pollution are dropped in the UK every day! I can’t think of a better way to tangibly teach the next generation, and to re-teach ourselves about consumption habits while also getting everyone outside, moving, and having fun.
Here Are Our Top Takeaways from Organizing Trail Cleans This Autumn:
Accessible and Multi-Generational Fun
Trail cleaning is an activity without boundaries—it’s suitable for all ages and can be done practically anywhere. This makes it an easy and inclusive way to get outside and connect with nature. Whether you're at a park, beach, or simply walking through your neighborhood, it's a great way to enjoy the outdoors together as a family or community. It can be as chatty or as quiet as you like.
A Tangible Lesson in Waste
While there’s definitely a feel-good factor in leaving a place better than you found it, trail cleaning can also be an eye-opening and, at times, sobering experience. The sheer amount of waste can feel overwhelming - there was one particular part where we spent over an hour untangling zip ties from a mound of seaweed.
Participating in a trail clean is one of the most powerful lessons in reducing waste. There’s nothing quite like the hands-on experience of gathering rubbish to make you rethink whether you really need that new gadget or pair of shoes. The rocky parts of beaches are often the worst, with rubbish caught in every nook and cranny—places few people tread.
What really stood out to us was the variety of single-use pollution we encountered. From fishing gear like zip ties, nets, and lines to food packaging (we even found a Hoola Hoops packet from 2002!), and then the bizarre—many individual shoes, a hammer, a fridge handle, and a wing mirror. The microplastics were the most challenging, entangled in seaweed and requiring hours of effort from a group of adults just to make a small dent.
Embracing Creative Movement
One of the unique benefits of litter picking is the opportunity to engage in creative movement. As we age, maintaining access to all the movements our bodies are capable of becomes even more important, and what better way to do that than by tackling the natural obstacles you encounter while picking up trash?
We didn’t bother with pickers and encouraged everyone to consider crouching down in different ways to pick up rubbish. Climbing over rocks, crouching low, reaching into tight spaces, balancing, pulling out entangled robes — all of the novel movements that we often have no reason to do in our daily lives. All of which help build "in-between" strength, the kind that supports your body’s overall stability and flexibility as you age.
Next time you’re out for a walk, try adding a bit of playfulness to your movement: spend time on the ground, clamber over rocks, balance on uneven surfaces, and see if you can pick up that tiny piece of plastic that’s wedged in a tricky spot. Coastal areas are fantastic playgrounds for this, offering a variety of terrains that challenge your body in different ways.
We were impressed by how exhausted we were after each outing—all the creative movement, sea air, and lugging an increasingly heavy bin bag took its toll.
Staying Present Through Trail Cleaning
Something that struck us all was how focused you have to be throughout. There’s no space to do anything other than stay in the moment and quiet your mind. There’s something about the concentration required to spot trash, balance across rocks all whilst also chatting that seems to not allow for any mind wandering at all!
When we got home, we found that there’s some research suggesting that trail cleaning can be used in art therapy as a way to connect with the outside world and stay grounded in the present. By focusing on finding discarded items, participants were better able to live in the moment and forge a deeper connection between their inner world and the environment around them.
Building Community Connections
We’ve been thinking about this a lot lately—how can we feel an active part of our community?
So many of us are trying to live and survive as families on our own, particularly those of us who don’t have our parents nearby. We can't overestimate the benefits of belonging to a supportive, multigenerational community.
Coping with social isolation, anxiety, compassion, and strong personal connections—these aspects of mental health benefit so much from that sense of belonging. And joining or starting up your own litter picking group is a great place to start!
Growing and nurturing a community of different people from different backgrounds and beliefs can benefit us all. We know that satisfying relationships in mid-life with partners, friends, or work colleagues are linked to a lower risk of accumulating multiple long-term conditions in older age.
As WildStrong has grown and evolved, we refer back to different theories of well-being to keep us on course. We use Seligman’s theory of PERMA a lot, which lays out the five components that we need to build a more contented life:
Positive Emotion – finding joy, love, and gratitude
Engagement – being part of something bigger than ourselves
Relationships – with partners, friends, colleagues, and neighbors
Meaning – having a purpose and sense of belonging
Accomplishments – or mastery, to feel like we are improving intrinsic goals
Trail cleaning ticks most of these boxes!
Many of us who came on these walks were carrying a lot—not just our own worries but the worries of others. However, coming together, spending that time clambering over rocks and lugging huge bags of rubbish for miles, we came out the other side triumphant.
The worries we came in with, while still there, feel lesser somehow.
Thanks to Trash Free Trails for giving us the support and structure we needed, and thank you to everyone who came along this summer. We plan to keep these going, so look out for dates coming soon!
Words and images from Gill Erskine, WildStrong.
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