In our “News of Love” feature, we focus on one of the many positive news stories that tend to get overlooked in the overwhelming coverage of the negative. So let’s see how much LOVE is being shared out there!

It’s easy to forget about our trash. Every few days, we put it in a big bin, put it on the side of the road, and it miraculously disappears. And that trash doesn’t even include all the trash we throw away when away from home: our food eating out for lunch, the flyers handed out as we walk down the street, or the bottle from the soda we picked up at the convenience store. As we all know, too much of this trash is either unnecessarily thrown out or ends up littering our streets. Fortunately, there are six brave young adults who are striving to fix this problem. Traveling from Maryland to San Francisco, founders Jeff Chen and Davey Rogner of Pick Up America are collecting hundreds of thousands of pounds of trash. Their current count? 145,390 pounds! Along the way, they are promoting sustainability, cleanliness, and putting effort into keeping our country clean, pure, and beautiful.

This project has been a huge inspiration to us in many ways: to be more careful with how we handle our waste, to be more proactive seeking out recycling options, and to pick up those few loose pieces of trash we see as we walk around. The cynical view is that one person can only do so much, and so why waste the effort. Well, Jeff and Davey have shown us what a few people being optimistic can do: clean up 145,390 pounds of trash and counting!  Read more about Pick Up America here and we hope you find their story as inspiring as we did.

We have committed to use reusable grocery bags instead of taking paper or plastic bags each time we go to the grocery store as one simple step to help minimize our own waste. What are some other tips that we could all do to become better, cleaner, and more loving to our country’s land? Tell us in the comments below!

Have you seen News of Love in your neighborhood? Email us the story to loveisthekeyblog@gmail.com, and if we publish it you will receive 25% off your next order at the Love is the Key® Online Store!

Photo copyright © The Harvest Collective, Inc. 2011