It plays the whole thing straight, and that's exactly why it lands. A near future where litter-picking is a stadium sport on par with soccer sounds like a joke setup, but the show commits with the same tournament grammar and hero framing any shonen sports series would use, and it works. Akari is the girl who stands out least in her class, the kind of protagonist most shows would hand a special power to, and instead she gets a garbage bag and a reason to look up. Tokio is pure sports-anime archetype, the charismatic natural with talent and fans to spare, and the gap between them is the whole engine in a single episode. Yes, it's promotional material for an actual competitive sport that actually exists in Japan, and yes, the sincerity is real. One episode, no filler, and you finish it weirdly wanting to clean up a riverbank.

In the near future, picking up litter has turned into a competitive sport that rivals soccer in popularity. Akari is the least noticeable student in her class until the day she meets Tokio, a charismatic SpoGomi competitor with enormous talent and a huge following. Their meeting opens a coming-of-age sports story about young people from many countries, brought together by SpoGomi and a shared goal of ridding towns, rivers and oceans of garbage.