We all have clothes and items lying about at home, collecting dust, and professional marathon runner Brigid Wefelnberg is on a mission to ensure that these forgotten items are put to good use - somewhere in the world.

As she combines her passions of running, travel and charity work, each time Ms Wefelnberg packs her luggage to set off from her home in Germany on a marathon challenge, she asks family and friends to give her all their unwanted clothes and other items.

"You buy yourself things, you wear them for a while, then you find they're not your taste anymore. You don't want to throw them away because they cost a lot of money, so you end up leaving them in a corner to collect dust," she says.

"So every time I go on a trip I would go into the basement and pick up a small amount of things, pack them and take them with me to give to people who need them. I then started sending an e-mail out before leaving and asking for stuff."

Now, whenever she travels, she only uses a hand luggage for her personal items, then squeezes as many donations as she can into her luggage space and delivers it to people in need wherever she goes.

The same happened in connection with her week-long holiday in Malta this week, accompanied by her two teenage daughters. They packed their luggage with clothes and foodstuffs which Ms Wefelnberg personally delivered to Dar l-Emigrant on arrival.

"It's amazing how much stuff you can fit in a luggage. Poor people are concentrated in the warmer parts of this earth, so packing clothes for them does not take too much space," she says, adding that marathons have taught her to travel light.

"If I can do it, imagine what the result would be if more people do the same thing," she says enthusiastically as she stresses that she cannot tolerate people wasting and tries hard to pass on these values to her daughters.

Ms Wefelnberg became sensitive to the stark difference between poor and richer classes when she lived in Washington, US. She was moved at how poor and homeless people existed just round the corner from rich districts. Touched by this injustice, she started doing volunteer work.

As the years rolled past she became disillusioned by the materialistic city life in Washington and moved to southwest Germany where she lives today with her children.

Her passion for running evolved about the same time when a friend of hers took her, for the first time, to the Black Forest close to the area where she now lives.

She used to be a competitive swimmer when she first embarked on a four-hour steep walk up a mountain in the Black Forest. The experience exhausted her but left her wanting more and she soon started clearing her Sundays to go back and forth through the forest.

She started running and alpine hiking until, one day, she got a text message that completely changed her life. A friend asked her to run 250 kilometres through the desert during the six-day Marathon des Sables (marathon of sand) - the hardest footrace in the world - during which participants would only be provided with water and night-time shelter.

"I looked at my phone and thought: What has he been drinking?" But the idea enticed her and she applied for the marathon which she successfully completed.

Ever since that day Ms Wefelnberg has been chasing marathons and, now, with the help of her sponsors, she travels about six or seven times a year in pursuit of such challenges, which she links with charity work.

After running along the Great Wall of China and braving two Marathon des Sables in the south Moroccan Sahara, in February last year she participated in the Malta Marathon which she plans to run again next year. Before this year ends she will be running the Mahal Marathon in India in September, the Polar Circle Marathon in Greenland in October and the Boa Vista Ultra-Marathon on Cape Verde off the African coast in December.

She juggles her family life and work life, that also involves regular travels to India, and ensures that whenever she sets foot out of Germany, she takes items to donate to people in need in her destination country.

To learn more about Ms Wefelnberg visit: www.brigidwefelnberg.com and www.runbrigidrun.blogspot.com.