Orono app developer making great strides in cleaning up litter

Orono man's app inspiring people to pick up litter

An Orono man has found a unique way to motivate people to pick up litter while they?re out for a leisurely stroll. FOX 9?s Maury Glover has the story.

ORONO, Minn. (FOX 9) - Going for regular walks can be good for your health, but they can also be an exercise in civic engagement.

‘I like clean living environments’

What we know:

Once a week, Marcel Smits goes for a walk near his house in Orono to stretch his legs.

But with each step, he is also making great strides to clean up his neighborhood.

"The only way to get it really clean is civic engagement. That's just what the numbers show," said Smits.

‘We can turn this into a movement’ 

The backstory:

Smits started picking up litter on his walks more than 10 years ago, while living in a suburb of Chicago.

Since then, he's been a man on a mission, trekking 300 miles and picking up 40,000 pieces of trash around the country and across the globe in places like Korea, his native Netherlands and Singapore, which he now calls home 10 months out of the year.

"It's unseemly. So somebody's got to go and pick it up. You can't wait for the municipality to come and pick up, that's just not doable," said Smits.

There's an app for that

Local perspective:

Five years ago, Smits developed an app called Stridy, a combination of stride and tidy, which keeps track of how many miles the user has walked and how much trash they've picked up along the way.

He says so far, more than 9,000 people in 90 countries have signed up for Stridy, which also measures the impact one person can have on keeping public areas clean.

"A number of apps have tried and they've mostly broken down because they were too complex. So the simpler is better, and we have a relatively simple app," said Smits.

‘The important thing is not get annoyed’

What they're saying:

Smits says the number one reason more people don't pitch in is the belief that it won't do any good.

But he says Stridy shows we can all make a difference, one step at a time.

"There will always be people who litter and if we all sit around our tables and wait for there no longer to be people who litter, it's never going to happen," said Smits.