In the good old days, when I was living at home with my parents, we would have a clear out every so often and fill the back of the car with a load of our junk and drive down to the tip at Rodley and lob it all in a skip. The most stressful part of the whole exercise was finding a queue when we arrived at the tip. Today, I find a visit to the Household waste recycling centre a matter of extreme stress, staff wearing orange suits patrol the centre as though we are all criminals, about to commit the heinous crime of putting our rubbish in the wrong skip. I’m fine with following the directions, but get confused when throwing away a piece of wood with nails in it, should it go in the “timber” skip, or is it general waste. Worse still, when I turn up with a broken settee or a divan and I am scared to get caught throwing my rubbish in the wrong skip. I long to be green, but find the whole experience quite confusing.
Since we started our journey of considering the whole climate crisis issue seven weeks ago, I have been impressed by how Churches across the Ipswich Circuit have taken this on board and one of the biggest challenges we have faced, is the collection of medicine blister packs for recycling. It has amused me how boxes have started to appear in Churches and how quickly they have filled up. The eagerness to respond to this particular piece of recycling has caused its own problems, pharmacies have been overwhelmed with the sheer volume of packets needing to be recycled and Churches who are collecting these are now finding them difficult to dispose of.
I have two anxieties about this, firstly, I am shocked at what an unhealthy nation we are, that we are dependent on literally millions of packets of drugs, to keep us going and maybe our response needs to be to think about the way we live, to reduce the number of pills we need in the first place. Secondly, we can’t possibly be creating more waste, than the demand for medication, so the large pharmaceutical companies need to respond to this quickly, some of our people have already started to write to the likes of Superdrug and Boots.
If we learn anything at all from Jesus, whether we are religious or not, the key lesson is that he stood up for what was right and made waves if that was the right course of action. Like with most things, we have a choice, we can either stand by and do nothing, hoping that somebody else will pick up the baton or we can do what is necessary ourselves.
Choose carefully as you buy, opting for recyclable packaging before picking up plastics.
Challenge manufacturers to be more responsible in their packaging choices.
Look at what you dispose of and make good choices. The tip might be more stressful today, but we are reducing land fill significantly.
Please read our supporting information on week 7 of our Climate Crisis pages on our Website by visiting https://methodistic.org.uk/climate-action/
A prayer for this week:
Pray for understanding and respect that the earth’s resources are precious, should be used sparingly and wisely, but give rise to lasting damage when used wastefully.