These Trekking Poles Make Cleaning Litter While Hiking Convenient & Enjoyable
Cheers to inventor John McShane who came up with a novel solution to combat litter on hiking trails using a piece of equipment you probably already use. It is our great pleasure to introduce CleanTrek, the world’s first trekking pole attachments for effortless litter removal. The CleanTrek lightweight Grabber and Collector are designed to seamlessly connect to your existing poles, enabling you to pick up and store trash without missing a step.
CleanTrek is currently live on Kickstarter where they have secured $22,401 of their $40,500 funding goal. The complete CleanTrek Kit (Grabber and Collector) are selling for $135, and you can also purchase them separately.
Cheers to John McShane for inventing this clever device. We sincerely hope he reaches his funding goal and we start seeing the CleanTrek on trails around the world!
The Problem:Â
Litter cleanup is too INCONVENIENT! It’s not that we don’t care—it’s just that we hike to enjoy ourselves, and bending over to touch some nasty garbage can kill the mood pretty quickly. But when we choose to do nothing, litter just accumulates.
The Solution:
I’m John McShane, the founder of CleanTrek. I’m a hiker who believes in preserving nature, but as much as I hate litter, I often can’t bring myself to pick it up. I figured better tools were the solution, but I was disappointed by my options. I didn’t want to wear rubber gloves or carry around bulky grabbers and bags—no, I wanted something that naturally blended into my existing hiking setup, without interfering with the enjoyment of my hike in any way.
I had an idea:Â since many hikers already enjoy hiking with trekking poles, what if these poles could be used to pick up litter?
Long story short, over the last couple years, I’ve invented patent-pending, lightweight attachments to your trekking poles that enable you to grab and store litter while still enjoying your hike. They’re sleek, simple, fun, and can retrofit onto just about any trekking pole!
Data-Driven Impact
In 2020, a report estimated that 49.6 billion pieces of litter lined US roadways and waterways, with 88% measuring 4 inches or less. With 330 million US residents in 2020, each person would only have to pick up 152 pieces of litter to eliminate all of it.
Yosemite National Park gets about 4 million visitors per year. If each visitor filled up just one CleanTrek Collector (1.5 liters each), that would be enough litter to fill up 2 Olympic-size swimming pools. How long do you think it would take to pick all that up by yourself?
Every year, volunteers at Yosemite National Park participate in the Yosemite Facelift event. In 2023, 1,501 volunteers dedicated 12,151 hours across 5 days to remove a whopping 10,432 lbs of litter from the park. Astoundingly, this represents just 0.023% of the total hours spent by visitors at Yosemite that year. Imagine if just 1% of all visitors cleaned up litter while exploring the park—that’d be equivalent to 43 Facelift events!
Point is, we have strength in numbers! Imagine if you committed to grabbing just 1 out of every 100 pieces of litter you spot, knowing that the 99 hikers behind you will do the same. All of a sudden, your small action doesn’t seem so small anymore.
Also, just think: litter accumulates gradually. One guy drops a candy wrapper. A gust of wind blows a napkin off a picnic table, etc. So shouldn’t our approach to cleaning litter be gradual, too? Shouldn’t we pick it up as early as possible, before it has a chance to blow off the trail? All we need to do is pick up litter more quickly than we create it, and with the right tools, I believe that’s possible.
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