St Mary’s Musings Waste not..want not!
Perhaps a few of us will remember the wartime imperative about not wasting anything at a time when just about everything was in short supply! Today with plentiful supplies available – one might say excessively abundant supplies - of food and consumer goods, sensitivity to and awareness of waste has been much reduced. Although some households carefully choose their purchases, and conscientiously recycle their plastic, paper and glass, the evidence is undeniable of a crisis in waste management and waste pollution worldwide.
The season of Lent traditionally offers the opportunity both to give up something we like and to do something we might not normally choose to do. As children we gave up sweets, and saved our pennies for the Missionary box or similar charity. As adults today the choices are wider and can have much more impactful consequences. The choice of foods, without plastic wrapping, locally grown rather than transported half way across the world to our table; water from the tap rather than in plastic bottles which will take hundreds of years to decompose if not recycled.
Around 100,000 tons of plastic rubbish makes up the 600,000 square miles of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The situation with landfill is no better. Here one of the worst culprits is the fashion industry. Very few people now buy clothing expecting it to last for repeated wearing over a long time. ‘Fast Fashion’ sees cheap clothes, produced in sweatshops abroad, worn once or twice then discarded. The charity shops normally have a comprehensive selection of sizes and styles, - recycling off the peg, giving financial aid for any number of charities. Oxfam for example saves over 7000 tons of clothing from landfill annually.
Lent gives the chance to look at our lifestyle, to change our ways, to play a small but nevertheless important part in waste reduction. Giving up some favoured foods and composting our food wastes. Repairing worn or broken items if we can rather than replacing them. Being more careful about the segregation of waste items into the rubbish bins. Making more visits to the charity shops, for toys, hardware, clothes, gifts, the list is endless! There is no such thing as junk – it is good stuff in the wrong place. Sir David Attenborough has made it clear, “For the sake of our planet we must focus on our waste crisis”.
God’s Divine providence is the source of all that we have. We cannot rightly be careless about consumption, hasty about waste or thoughtless about throwaways. We pray that God’s Spirit will move in us this Lent and bring us to care more for our precious world.
David Peacock