The war on plastic

A rubbish lorry pulls up at sea wall and its container slowly tips. As its jaws start to open a tangled mass of bags and packaging begins to slide towards the sea. You know there must be some camera trick going on, but it’s still hard not to shout at the TV: ‘Stop! Don’t do it!’

This is the shock opening to BBC’s documentary series, War on Plastic, (aired in June, now available on iPlayer). In this programme, following David Attenborough’s exposé of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Anita Rani ride the wave of environmental concern, exploring our problem with plastic use and waste.

We see Rani delivering milk early in the morning and seeking to speak to company representatives about the undisclosed presence of plastic in baby wipes. She marches to McDonalds’ headquarters with a petition against their free plastic toys, accompanied by eager children and a trolley of Happy Meal tat.

Fearnley-Whittingstall visits a dump of UK plastic in Malaysia which had been conscientiously sorted for recycling by UK householders, and interviews children there suffering from respiratory diseases brought on by the burning of the West’s waste. He speaks to Michael Gove and the manager of a huge UK plastic producer. Threaded through all of this is the story of neighbours on one street in Bristol as they assess their plastic use, make changes and join the war. The subtext isn’t hard to see: they are ordinary, just like you, so you can do it too.

This kind of eco-evangelism isn’t new, of course. I remember the 1980s, when my mum went to the health food shop to fill her own containers, and we had school lessons on acid rain and the ozone layer. What might be new, though, is the scale of the problem and the mainstream place of the debate. Extinction Rebellion might look like a bunch of middle-class hippies, and Greta Thunberg’s campaigns appear extremely idealistic, but this series engages everyday working people and the everyday complications of limited budgets and tight time schedules.

War on Plastic directly challenges large supermarkets and government alike, with some results. And, while most of the corporations were dodging questions, exposure means the questions raised by this campaigning journalism won’t go away. Above all, the programmes are optimistic about tackling plastic pollution and, through that, even climate change.

What should we do?

So then, is this all good? Should we as individuals enlist in this anti-plastic, anti-waste war? Perhaps the answer is both a yes and a no. There is much we can do, as churches and as individuals. And a lot of this is what Protestant Christians have often been good at – careful stewardship of resources; a certain kind of frugality and thriftiness; charity shops and re-use of resources; buying with an eye to ethics; distrusting extravagance. Surely, we can bring our own coffee mugs to church, rather than using disposable ones, for a start, and make sure we choose loose vegetables in the supermarket where we can. But making our own washing powder or writing letters to supermarkets or buying toothpaste in a jar; is this really what we should be doing, when there is so much gospel need out there?

On this kind of issue we often draw our own lines in the sand, deciding what for us is realistic, and what seems just too weird. And we end up watching campaigning programmes like War on Plastic feeling either complacent or guilty.

Right concern, false gospel

The problem with this, though, is that we maybe miss the big gospel picture. Because ultimately environmentalism is a false gospel, though it is a right concern. It misdiagnoses the problem as something out there, and not in our hearts. War on Plastic identifies big corporations and bad legislation as the creators of our plastic crisis, not the greed and laziness which is in all our hearts. It implies that I can’t help having cupboards full of rubbish because they make me buy it!

This not only simplifies the scientific issues of plastic, but it simplifies the solution. Environmental problems should make us grieve over our wickedness and cry out for wisdom and grace. They should make us pray and ask the questions of what it means to love God and our neighbours in this situation, rather than replace the idolatries of consumption and convenience with the idolatry of virtuous green living.

As the environment becomes an increasingly important part of our culture’s conversation, we need to endeavour to point out to our friends and colleagues that we cannot fix our mess, and that the mess is even greater than climate warming and plastic pollution because it stems from the pollution of our hearts. It is the lavish, seemingly wasteful outpouring of Christ’s life on the cross which brings change to us and our world.