The Importance of Being Educated on Recycling

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!

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 at 9:56 am and is filed under The Daily. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.