• Reusable bags: more popular than ever! [Albany Times-Union]
• Eva Longoria-Parker and H-E-B promote reusable bags for Earth Day! [Houston Chronicle]
• Reusable bag sales raise money and awareness for students in Lakeside, MN. [Chisago County Press]
• Plastic bag pollution in Tanzania referred to as “alarming.” [IPP Media]
• Reusable bags an appealing choice in the Silicon Valley. [KLIV]
• Meanwhile, legislative hearings for a California bag tax are going well. [WBIR]
• Earth Day is already underway ahead of schedule in Rhode Island! [Providence Journal]
• New York state law aims to make recycling plastic bags easier. [9-WSYR]
• Find more ways to get active for Earth Day! [My Ozarks Outdoors]

Photo via Flickr!

Recycling is vital to preserving our environment — but that fact alone is nothing without the education and understanding needed to put the concept into action. This is true everywhere, but according to Johannesburg’s Institute of Waste Management, nowhere is such education more desperately needed than in South Africa. With over a thousand landfill sites choking its land residents with rising methane levels and its ocean denizens with mercury, a change is needed before ecological problems become unmanageable.

“There needs to be a cohesive effort on the part of all the players in waste management to educate people about the crisis facing all of us if we don’t curb our wasteful behaviour,” [IWM president Vincent] Charnley said.

He said most of the waste was manufactured unnecessarily because South Africans bought impulsively, stocking their fridges with foodstuffs they never eat.

“An alarming percentage of what we throw away probably need not have been wasted to begin with and even more disturbingly, a lot of that is food,” he said.

As the biggest problem is reportedly everyday impulsiveness on the part of average people, the biggest change then needs to be in the way average people think. According to Charney the key, in addition to having people understand the environmental plight facing their land, lies in getting people excited about career opportunities in waste management.

He said people needed to be made aware of “entrepreneurs in our country who make a living from recycling waste”.

“We have an inventive population that not only manages waste to earn their keep, but there are those that manufacture sealable objects from plastic, tin cans and other waste items,” Charnley said.

A varied approach does seem the right tactic to take — motivations that may work for one person might not work for another. There seems to come a point in time where financial gain versus ecological concern as a reason to recycle no longer matters: the important thing is that the habits change and the earth can heal, whatever it takes.

Photo via Flickr!