What Goes Where?

What Goes Where?

Field Trip!  Our church’s Blue Theology Task Force put on hard hats today and watched 30 tons an hour of plastic, glass, paper and metal being sorted and bailed at our Monterey Regional Waste Management “Materials Recovery Facility.” Their mission statement: Turn Waste into Resources.

Every week I put bottles and plastic and cardboard into my recycling bin, but where does it go? I learned, for example, that a bottle enters the Materials Recovery Facility and 9 minutes later it is sorted from all the other recyclable material and all the glass goes off to the Gallo Winery where they will turn all the glass from the Central Coast tri-counties into new bottles.  New wine skins. 

The fabulous Kimberley and Angela from our Waste Management’s public education department taught us what is recyclable and what is not, how to shop more sustainably, where it all goes. 

We thought we were the first faith community to be so enlightened.  Turns out the local synagogue has already made their many wonderful food festivals zero waste.  A little ecumenical competition?

This summer we plan to bring here the 100 or so youth we will host on service trips about ocean conservation to learn what goes where.  There’s an app for that – whatgoeswhere.info.

There is no such thing as “away.”  We can’t throw things away.  California law requires 50% of all waste to be diverted through source reduction, reuse, recycling, and composting.

Anything diverted from the landfill and the beach and the ocean, plastic especially, gives ocean animals a chance to live and breathe.  Godly work.

What is your local waste management facility doing to help the ocean?  Call them up and take the tour.  Or come see ours! 

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www.bluetheology.com – Check out available times this year for your youth group or women’s fellowship or intergenerational group to spend a day, weekend or week at our Blue Theology Mission Station in Pacific Grove learning about how God loves the ocean and wants us to love it better, including a spiritual tour of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.   Ocean stewardship and spirituality.  I post these Wednesday devotionals here and at www.bluetheologytideings.blogspot.com