Celebrate for one day then get back to work the next was the plan for Yuyun Ismawati after winning the “Nobel Prize” of environmental awards.

Indonesia’s Yuyun, 44, was one of the winners of this year’s Goldman Environmental Prize, a prestigious award often referred to as the “Nobel Prize” for environmental activism.

She was recognized for her tireless efforts to pressure major hotels in Bali to reduce their solid waste output and to improve recycling efforts.

She received the award, which includes a $150,000 prize, during a ceremony on April 20 in the United States.

“I am going to use the money to finally get myself and my family a house, and also for my girls’ college tuition,” said the mother of two teenage girls. “And half of it will go to some environmental organizations — one of which is Ashoka, which helped me a lot through my early years as an activist.”

Yuyun is the founder and director of the Bali Fokus Foundation, an NGO that has worked on community-based environmental management, pollution control and sustainable development programs since 2000.

“I consider this award to be just the beginning of the struggle because waste issues have never been exposed to the media, even though the issue is very much an everyday part our lives,” she said.

“The government is usually tempted to solve the problem with mega-projects, high technology and lots of money, but we can actually do it on our own without any help or any international debt. We just need to be realistic.”

Raising awareness of waste management, however, is particularly difficult among poor people, Yuyun said, because villagers do not believe that change can be achieved using cheap and simple methods.

Her successful campaign focuses on local people managing their own waste first before taking it to the dump.

This year’s Goldman Environmental Prize recipients also included Maria Gunnoe, a US woman who has faced death threats for her outspoken activism against the coal industry in West Virginia, and Marc Ona Essangui, a civil society leader from the West African country of Gabon who has risked imprisonment for his campaign to stop mining in a protected national park.

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