Marketing Matters

I read a great section in Mother Jones last night, titled, "Waste Not Want Not—We're burying the planet in garbage. Here's how to dig out." As an expert in social change marketing, wellness promotion, wellness marketing and wellness promotion, I've spent much of my career working with green marketing companies and wellness companies to create campaigns designed to inspire Americans to reduce, reuse, recycle, rethink and respond.

In the last twenty years, we've done much to raise awareness and spark action, but as the mounds of disposables continue to stack up in landfills and incinerators there's still much to be done. One of the unsung vanguards of this movement, New Yorker, activist, classical singer and blogger Juli Borst, who is profiled in the Mother Jones section, is leading the way. While I'm sure that Juli's dedication, which goes so far as to collect plastic bottle caps from sidewalks and walk them to places like Whole Foods who "take No 5's," strikes most as a bit over the top. I think she's on to something. Besides educating about the fact that tiny recycling numbers are printed on the insides of plastic caps, waste-reduction activists like Juli are stretching the boundaries of basic and fundamental recycling methods like curbside recycling to move us as a culture into a deepening awareness about the consequences of a "wasted"  lifestyle.