Learning from Singapore

Singapore is already one of the world’s cleanest cities because they have laws against littering and they enforce them properly. Look at this squeaky clean street. Wouldn’t you love to have your city look like this? Now the National Environment Agency of Singapore has launched a program to encourage people to use reusable bags instead of plastic bags. They aren’t doing this in any knee-jerk manner like suddenly banning plastic bags without even considering what alternatives people can use. No, they have a planned program, which starts with an educational process for schools, where they are giving away beautifully produced teaching materials to teachers and schools to use. That’s the most effective way to go. Get children to first understand and then spread the message. We are in the reusable bags business because one day my daughter came home from school and banned plastic bags from our home, thanks to one wonderful teacher who made the kids understand how much harm plastic bags are doing. We’ve recently formed a body called the Ecoright Association where the first thing we done is to manufacture a product that is a viable alternative to plastic bags. Because a viable alternative cannot be made at as low a cost as plastic bags, we’ve deployed our marketing, branding and business exposure to evolve a strategy by which people can acquire these alternate bags at a very low cost by involving corporations and brands that understand the benefits they derive from looking like good corporate citizens who contribute to the welfare of society.