For those who watched Blue Planet 2 you will not have failed
to notice the presence of plastic in the oceans. The documentary makers never
set out to highlight this issue but over the course of all their filming and
the subsequent programmes it became obvious that waste plastic presents a huge
problem to the environment today. I didn’t see Blue Planet but have recently
read Lucy Siegle’s book Turning the Tide
Against Plastic: How Humanity (And You) Can Make Our Globe Clean Again.
The first part of this excellent book details how plastic
has become part of our everyday life in ever increasing measure. The author
shares her own wake up call to the rise of plastic in society and the damage
that plastic is causing to the planet that God has entrusted to us to steward.
Most shocking of all is the ocean gyres, most noticeably the Great Pacific
Garbage Patch, which covers 600,000 square miles, it dwarfs France, is bigger
than Texas, weighs in at 79,000 tonnes and contains an estimated 1.8 trillion
pieces of rubbish, 99.9 per cent of which is plastic.
Siegle suggests how we might keep track of the plastic we
use and measures we can put in place to reduce our plastic footprint. She
suggests the 8 R’s as follows, record, reduce, replace, refuse, reuse, refill,
rethink and recycle. There are lots of very practical hints and tips here that
we can all action so that we are doing our bit. I was struck by how little
plastic is actually possible to recycle and often gets filtered out in the
process. We think we are sending our used plastic to recycle so that is okay
but it is far better not to use it in the first place.
Change is starting to happen; single use plastic straws have
quickly disappeared from many places following recent campaigning. Hopefully
the tide is beginning to turn. But it needs all of us to become aware of how
much plastic has taken over our lives and to take all the actions we can to cut
out its use from our lives. I encourage you to read this book but more
importantly I encourage you to take action in the many ways it suggests. Or you
could find the Church of England’s Lent Plastic Challenge and use that this
Lent. As we approach Easter many of the eggs we buy contain a huge amount of
single use plastic packaging. This year there is even more reason to buy The
Real Easter Egg from the Meaningful Chocolate Company. Not only is the
Chocolate Fairtrade and the egg include a booklet explaining the real Easter
story but there is also no plastic packaging! Together our small actions can
make a big difference; together we can turn the tide.
