Star date: March 4th, 2014.
The day before Lent.
These are the voyages of Marie Mo.  Her continuing mission, to explore strange new worlds.  To seek out new life, and new theologies.  To boldly go where no one has gone before. 

Ok, I'm more of a geek.  I'm a wife, mother, pastor, sci-fi fan, and occasional political activist. 

This year my family and I had a really fascinating idea for a Lenten practice.  We thought that we would try to go completely without plastics for Lent.  None.  We wouldn't use a speck of it. 

Riiiiiiiiight. 

It took only one trip to the grocery store to see the impossibility of this plan.  For starters, how do I buy milk?  That milk in cardboard is nasty, yo.  Just saying.  But if it was just milk, I'd suck it up--it wasn't.  The problem with plastics is that it covers EVERYTHING, from cheese to cereal to potatoes!  I still wanted to explore my relationship to plastics, but it couldn't be via abstinence, not true abstinence.  Oh, to be sure, I can buy the ranch dressing in the glass bottle (for $2 more), but not every product has such diversity in packaging.  See: cheese.

Rather, I realized what my REAL practice would need to be: to explore our relationship to plastics.
Going to that store, I realized how much whole food was stored in plastic bags.  How even boxes had plastic bags inside them--and more troubling, these are not recyclable plastics. 

Recyclable plastics, at least where I live, include #1-7 including lids, tubs and caps, as well as rigid plastics like laundry baskets, plastic tubs and potted plants.  This does not include the little bits of plastic I see so often: straw covers, those plastic windows on pasta boxes, the bags of frozen vegetables.  I saw this tragic video about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and the birds that were starving to death there.  Baby birds being fed bottle caps and plastic rings, but the vortex, the actual 'patch' is this submerged area the size of Texas or something, and most of the plastic is teeny tiny.  Like, the size of krill.  Which is pretty much the entire problem...it's getting eaten instead of krill AND it's too damn small to easily pick it up and clean it up.  Oh, and it's international waters, so who's going to take responsibility for that anyway?  Anyway, that's a tangent...

Recently I'd heard about something called the "Green Curtain" falling in China, who had once been the greatest importer of world plastics but is no longer accepting plastics.  Well, is no longer accepting OUR plastics, for you see, I think we've been exporting most of our plastics. According to a report I'd heard (on NPR, yes), America was making money by exporting our plastics to China; China though had stopped accepting imported plastics for recycling.  In the interim time, America had no infrastructure to deal with actual plastic recycling; we'd always sold it off.  So what is happening to my 'recyclable plastics' now?

The real question though is this: is it true?  It's one thing to say "I heard on NPR..." and quite another to actually KNOW something.  Time to do my own research. 

What IS the relationship of me to plastics, and plastics to the larger world?
As a Christian, what does it mean that these materials are not always safe, and that they cannot always be reclaimed or recycled?  How are these materials going to affect the world I am leaving to my children?

So this blog is an effort to answer my own questions, and raise my own awareness.  I'm posting about it for 40 days (not counting Sundays!) simply to force myself to do it, and to possibly educate others.  So I welcome thoughts, comments, additional posts.  I'll be posting links and information as well.  Please don't think I hate plastics, in the medical field alone they've done more lifesaving than...I don't know what.   But I think the pendulum has swung too far.   It's time to rethink our relationship.  And, of course, what this means to Creation Care, our role as stewards of the planet, and our responsibility as humans, consumers, people and believers.