I wrote the following meditation for today's All-Age service at St Johns Seven Kings which has been planned by our Peace & Justice committee and which focuses on the Countdown to Copenhagen:
Each of you was given, as you arrived, a green plastic milk bottle top. Please hold it in your hand now and spend a moment looking at it.
It is a familiar everyday object; one that we see most days but do not think about. We handle it when we remove it in order to pour out our milk and then replace it to help in keeping the milk fresh. When the milk bottle is empty then we throw it away.
The world's annual consumption of plastic materials has increased from around 5 million tonnes in the 1950s to nearly 100 million tonnes today, which means that we use 20 times as much plastic today than we did 50 years ago. All plastics, including these bottle tops, but also many of the materials used to make the clothes we are wearing and the carpet we are walking on, plus hundreds of the other products we take for granted, are made from petrochemicals and a main ingredient in petrochemicals is oil. Our increased use of plastics uses up the world’s limited supplies of oil more quickly.
It is estimated that only 7% of plastic waste is recycled at present, so 93% of an increasing number of plastic items, including our bottle tops, currently go to landfill. These bottle-tops are a symbol of waste, a sign of our throw-away society. How many do we throw away each week, each month, each year?
Bottle-tops are hard to recycle because there are only a few companies that genuinely recycle them and only a few charities that genuinely collect them. We will have to go out of our way if we are to recycle bottle-tops, just as we also have to go out of our way if we are to recycle items that are not on our Council’s list for collection in our recycling boxes.
It is easy to recycle the paper, tins and plastic and glass bottles that the Council will collect from our homes but more difficult to recycle the cardboard, printer cartridges, bottle tops and other items that will only be recycled if we take them to the recycling centre. Will we do the easy thing or the harder thing when it comes to recycling?
Our bottle tops are green and green is the colour that we associate with the countryside and with environmental care. Our bottle tops can be reminders to us that we can be green, if we do the extra things that make a difference when it comes to recycling or conserving energy or lobbying MPs for Government action on climate change.
Please take your green milk bottle top home as a reminder of actions you want to take as a result of today’s service – like recycling things you currently throw away or switching off appliances that are usually left on stand-by or going to The Wave on 5th December to demonstrate your support for a safe climate future for all. Put the bottle top in your pocket and each time you touch remind yourself of what you have said you will do.
Let us pray ... Lord, we hold these bottle tops and they remind us of our wasteful, throw-away world which is rapidly using up the resources you have given to us. Make us truly sorry for our wasteful actions and turn us into those who conserve the world’s resources and lobby for Governments to stop the waste and stop climate chaos. May we be part of a wave of people around the world seeking and achieving a safe climate future for all. Amen.
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Athlete - Hurricane.
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