I remember my wonder in my school science laboratory in the early 50s when we made plastic. We were all agog that there would now be no need to replace rotten wood or rusted metal. How short-sighted we were! We did not consider how God had made a circular economy in which everything on earth is made and then decays. God’s creation constantly changes. God is eternal; what God makes is not. As Ecclesiastes says in 3:6 there is “a time to keep and a time to throw away”. Our task here is not to outdo God but to gather another fruit, “fruits for eternal life” (John 4:36).
Now every one of us has microscopic particles of plastic within us. We do not yet know whether this is dangerous to us. What we do know is that something that humankind has created is now lodged eternally on earth. Plastic has allowed the endless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries. This momentous change occurred in the mid-20th century. Many churches, including our own, go to considerable lengths to recycle plastic. But in 2018 only one third of all plastic items from households could be recycled because they were of low-grade, mixed or contaminated. The most difficult to recycle are tetrapacks which are composed of several different materials. We export half of our packaging debris through firms which claim to recycle it. In fact it is often dumped or burnt abroad in lands such as Turkey. The scale of what we’re doing is beyond our comprehension: a hundred thousand pieces of plastic packaging are created every minute by our supermarkets.
What has this to do with global heating? Plastic is almost all made from oil. God’s creation ensured that this carbon-rich material was sequestered for aeons under the earth. We have pumped it out and are now paying the price for subverting the creation of our God and releasing oil’s carbon dioxide which is resulting in the burning of the planet. Extinction Rebellion, churches including our Connexion and many others are increasing pressure on the oil firms to switch to renewable energy production. But these firms’ whole existence is predicated on the use of oil. If, because of electric cars and renewable energy production, they cannot burn the oil, they can make it into plastic. We cannot for ever go on burying plastic; increasingly we are burning it, thus releasing the CO2 which we previously emitted from fossil fuel burning.