Day five: stop the waste

Watch today's video

Take on today’s challenge

The average UK household throws away a whole tonne of rubbish every year. Added up, that's the equivalent of the weight of three and a half million double-decker buses.

Option 1: Don’t throw it

For 48 hours, don’t throw anything away. Pile up what you would have thrown away and reflect on what it would be like to never have any waste collection.

Option 2: Ditch the plastic

Make a list of all the single-use plastic items that you normally use. Water bottles, shampoo, hand soap, etc. Make a pledge for one month to swap these with a sustainable alternative.

Bonus idea

Look up a zero waste shop near you and start buying some of your essentials there, and find out how Tearfund is supporting new social enterprises that are collecting and recycling rubbish for the first time ever through Bin Twinning.

Pause to reflect

‘The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it.’ (Psalm 24:1)

Creation belongs to God. All of it. And as he made it, he declared it to be ‘good’. Beautiful. Wonderful. Joyful. Abundant.

How you treat a creation says a lot about how you view its creator. So, how are we treating creation?

Wastefully. We live in the age of ‘throw it away’. What would happen if there was no one to take our waste away? For many, that’s a horrible reality.

Today, 2 billion people in the world’s poorest countries are living and working among piles of waste. Drinking polluted water. Breathing toxic air from plastic burning. Battling sickness. This all leads to up to a million deaths a year – and each day the waste mountains are growing.

Much of this is plastic. Plastic that takes hundreds of years to decompose. Even after it does, it becomes microplastics and stays in our environment. These microplastics have been found in every environment on Earth – from the tops of the highest mountains to the bottom of the oceans… and even in the human body.

How can we all reduce the amount of waste in our own lives? How, in our daily habits, can we say to the creator God: we love you; we love the world you have made and given to us; we will take care of it.

Today’s prayer

• Ask God to help you to reduce the amount of waste in your life.
• Pray that the large corporations that are dumping mountains of waste on poor communities around the world will stop this awful practice.
• Thank God for people around the world, who are finding innovative ways to be more sustainable and protect their environment.