Give Up Waste for Lent

Laudato Si Reflection, Week One

As a first step in making your “fasting” more outwardly focused, let us suggest giving up waste for Lent. 

By this I mean, consider making part of your Lenten practice an attempt to significantly reduce the amount of voluntary waste you create as part of your daily life. This will help us focus – change our hearts – on how we use the Earth’s resources, and how we, as stewards of God’s Earth, take action, especially in our homes. This suggestion stems from one of the key teachings of Laudato si’: modern society has developed a “throwaway culture,” a culture that we need to change.

Everything and anything in our system of production can be disposable, but Francis notes that this system has no ability to absorb and reuse waste and waste products the way nature does. (Laudato si’, #22). The average American produces about 5 pounds of municipal solid waste each day. That adds up to almost 300 million tons of trash each year in the US alone. 

The single largest component of all this trash is food waste. More than one-third of all the food produced in the US each year ends up in landfills. You might think this is not a problem since food waste readily decomposes back into soil. However, modern landfills are designed to seal in waste, preventing oxygen from reaching it. This forces microbes to break down organic matter anaerobically, resulting in a mixture of roughly 50% methane and 50% carbon dioxide. While all organic waste produces methane, food waste decomposes quickly, producing significant methane faster than materials like wood or paper (which together make up the next largest component). After that it is plastics and then textiles.

Our “throwaway culture” is really about short-sighted convenience. Waste arises when, in the moment, the easiest thing to do with something I no longer want is to throw it in the trash, a choice that may provide a short-term benefit to ourselves, but which ignores the cost to others, and to our common home. We ignore these costs because we do not incur them directly. Pope Francis refers to the attachment to “convenience” as an addiction. He points out that what drives our addiction, in large part, is that our society’s definition of “progress” is built on the assumption that more is always better. On the other hand, the standard hierarchy of actions to reduce waste is “reduce – reuse – recycle/compost.” 

To reduce, don’t buy an extra of something “just in case” and then end up throwing it away. And recycling some items, like electronic items or old clothes, takes special effort, but the biggest impact is with food and paper. According to Recology, fewer than 20 percent of San Franciscans actually use their compost bins for food waste. You can put this waste in reused paper bags and put those bags into the compost bin. Every year about twice as much paper ends up in the trash bins than in the recycle bins. Whenever you take action to reduce waste, giving up waste for Lent, thank God for the abundance you have. 

Dan Sullivan, member of Laudato Si Circle at St. Ignatius Parish