Recycle Mission

03/13/2022

From the Void, they came to being
Land and water, beast and man;
Transfigured, all parts in Creation.

Beaten, bruised, His body stained
With the sins of all mankind;
Transfigured, they lay bare for all.

War, corruption, death, consumption
Our part affects all parts;
Misfigured, they lay bare for all.

From neglect, exclusion, hatred, pride
A new life for the discarded;
Transfigured, all parts in Creation.

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All proceeds from this crucifix will be donated to Ukrainian refugee support through USA for UNHCR

100% hand-made from discarded #5 PP lids and packaging. Now available on Etsy.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/1196113863/transfigured-hand-made-recycled-plastic

03/06/2022

The Value of Christ
Now available in our Etsy store! Hand Made from 100% recycled #5 plastic lids and containers.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/1191222267/the-value-of-christ-hand-recycled

09/28/2021

09/18/2021

"Why was this oil not sold for three hundred days’ wages and the money given to the poor?" (Jn 12:5)

Not once in the Gospels do we hear of the resale value of something in a positive manner. Yes, we often hear of ### days' wages in debt or ### days' wages of food; these are equating material needs (or debt) with the labor of man. But they do not talk of resale value. But, when Judas objects to the use of costly perfume to bathe Jesus' feet, we hear of the idea of selling the oil to buy something else, thus establishing its capital value.

In fact, it was rare to value possessions by how much they could be sold for. Sheep, wood, land, and even work was given the value of its worth to the person who owned it, or even the value of what went into its making. Supply and demand had no particular meaning when two people agreed to trade until centuries later. This may sound like a trivial difference, but in today's world, we don't often think of our possessions in terms of how much they are worth to us; we think of either how much they can be sold for, or how much it would cost to replace.

This 'capital' mindset has created our consumerist culture where someone can literally create a need solely based on advertising and marketing. The fidgit spinner would have literally been worth nothing to anyone who didn't know what it was, and yet it was marketed in a way that created value.

Then, we have single use items, which are almost given no value from the point of their creation. "Are not five sparrows sold for two small coins? Yet not one of them has escaped the notice of God." (Lk 12:6) This is a perversion of the gift of and labor that has been used to create these things.

Let us remember that it was Judas who wanted only to capitalize something that was of immeasurable worth to Christ in the shadow of His death; it was Judas who "said this not because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief and held the money bag and used to steal the contributions." (Jn 12:6)

-This brush was broken and therefore had no value to our system. Fixed with a little glue, it has incredible worth to my daughter who cried when she brought it to me.

09/14/2021

"(Saint Paul) does not hide the fact that, in terms of human wisdom, the cross appears as something completely different: it is “scandal”, “foolishness” (1 Cor 1:23-24). The cross was an instrument of death, yet it became the source of life. It was a horrendous sight, yet it revealed to us the beauty of God’s love. That is why, in today’s feast, the people of God venerate the cross and the Liturgy celebrates it.

How do we learn to see glory in the cross? Some of the saints teach us that the cross is like a book: in order to know it, we have to open it and read it. It is not enough to buy a book, take a look at it and put it on a shelf in our home. The same is true for the cross: it is painted or carved everywhere in our churches. Crucifixes are found all around us: on necks, in homes, in cars, in pockets. What good is this, unless we stop to look at the crucified Jesus and open our hearts to him, unless we let ourselves be struck by the wounds he bears for our sake, unless our hearts swell with emotion and we weep before the God wounded for love of us. Unless we do that, the cross remains an unread book whose title and author we know, without its having any impact on our lives. Let us not reduce the cross to an object of devotion, much less to a political symbol, to a sign of religious and social status.

If we fix our gaze on Jesus, his face comes to be reflected on our own: his features become ours, the love of Christ wins us over and transforms us.

For the cross is not a flag to wave, but the pure source of a new way of living. Which? That of the Gospel, that of the Beatitudes. A witness who bears the cross in his or her heart, and not only on his or her neck, views no one as an enemy, but everyone as a brother or sister for whom Jesus gave his life. A witness of the cross does not dwell on the wrongs of the past or keep lamenting the present. Witnesses of the cross do not employ the ways of deception and worldly pretension: they do not want to impose themselves and their own, but to give their lives for others. They seek not their own advantage, in order to be seen as devout: this would be a religion of hypocrisy, not a witness to the crucified Lord. Witnesses of the cross have but one strategy, that of the Master: humble love."

-Pope Francis, Mass from Square of the Mestská športová hala (Prešov)

09/10/2021

What if we had no landfills or waste collection?

This is much how most civilizations lived, even back to the time of the great Roman cities. Anything that could be reused was saved in one's home! Even in places of industry, archeologists have uncovered landfills which were created in urban centers for the sole purpose of being picked through for resources. What a difference from our desire to remove trash as far away as possible from our homes! (Mind you, all discovered litter dumps were a small fraction of the size of modern landfills, even when accounting for population.)

Of course, our modern culture creates things that are not meant to be reused - and often sells them for this exact purpose! If we had to live without trash collection, an individual would have to make serious and drastic changes to his or her consumption habits.

Our family tried to collect our single-use non-recyclable plastics for a month, with the sole purpose of washing and compacting them into so-called . In the end, we got tired of the manual work after 2 weeks, but collected almost 2 x 2-liter bottles in this time - about 2 pounds of landfill plastic! It was a great illustration for us to see how much our habits were not resource-minded. (I keep these bottles in my shop as a reminder.)

What if we valued our trash by the worth of its resources, and not as our economy does: How much it can be sold for?

Even worse, do we value people in the same way?

09/09/2021

While cleaning up, I noticed these scraps of plastic that fell from the drill bit. At one time, I would have swooshed this straight into the trash bin. But, now that plastic is my primary material source, I dutifully collected the shards and put them back into a supply cup.

I realize that I am treating plastic as a jeweler would treat gold. They wouldn't throw away some flakes, would they?

What if we treated all plastic as a precious resource, like copper or gold?
*Recycling would be a highly profitable business.
*There would be no microplastic problem in the oceans.
*Our green spaces and roadways would probably be much cleaner than they are!
*Fewer products would wastefully use plastic in throwaway packaging.

I'm not suggesting that we suddenly devalue currency and upend the economic model. Rather, I'm suggesting that we aren't providing the appropriate value to a a God-given resource that man has spent decades refining, a process that is incredibly destructive to lands, air, and people. The throwaway culture has been bootstrapped by hydrocarbon plastic materials for nearly a half century; this is a culture that has normalized the thinking that everything is expendable once it no longer has value.

God doesn't see the world as we do. He sees immense value in grass and flowers that can be burned and fade every day. The breath of the wind sustains life, while all the gold and bronze contained in the Earth is little more than dirt. My grandparents as well, after living through the Great Depression, had basements full of glass jars, cardboard boxes, magazines, wooden tools, etc. Why? Because they were taught that everything had some value tied to the resources and labor used to produce it, and because of this value, anything possible should be saved and used again.

For the most part, we've lost this culture as the Depression Generation has left us. Worse, we've scorned it, backlashed against it to the point of making it so convenient and socially prudent to 'disappear' anything...or anyone...with a scratch or slight imperfection with not even a prick in our conscience. The end result of this is an ever ending search for whatever can be mined, produced, or synthesized at the cheapest possible cost with the sole purpose of making it instantly disposable.

"This same “use and throw away” logic generates so much waste, because of the disordered desire to consume more than what is really necessary."
(Laudato Si', 123)

This is our throwaway economy. It is an economy that lauds the creation of things with little value so they can be thrown away and created again - a hamster wheel of production that never wants to look back and see the landfills full of its fruits.

What if we cared enough for each twist-tie that came on our sandwich bread? Every plastic milk lid ring? What if I saved every packing bubble, every cardboard box, every peanut butter canister and lid...not to find some way to ease my conscience, but because someone used something to make it for me?

We can only change this by recognizing the value of all materials, creatures, and people as gifts from God.

Who would throw away a gift that his Father gave?

09/08/2021

"Oceans not only contain the bulk of our planet’s water supply, but also most of the immense variety of living creatures, many of them still unknown to us and threatened for various reasons" - 40

“We cannot allow our seas and oceans to be littered by endless fields of floating plastic...We need to pray as if everything depended on God’s providence, and work as if everything depended on us." - Pope Francis , 2018 World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation

(All figures )

09/08/2021

'Trinity' - Now available
https://www.etsy.com/shop/RecycleMission

09/06/2021

"I saw how they worked, how they lived off the city’s leftovers, recycling what society discarded, and I saw, too, how some elites regarded them as leftovers themselves.

I could see the city through their eyes and experience the indifference they suffered, that indifference that turns into a well-mannered, silent violence.

I saw the face of the throwaway culture.

But I also saw the dignity of the 'cartoneros': how hard they worked to maintain their families and feed their children, how they worked collaboratively, as a community. In organizing they entered into their own kind of conversion, a recycling of their own lives. And along the way they changed the way Argentines viewed their garbage, helping them to understand the value of reusing and recycling."
-Pope Francis, Let Us Dream

Pope Francis tells this story of when he accompanied the cartoneros, a subculture of men and boys who "scour the streets at night in search of cardboard and other materials they sell to recyclers." By accompanying them not as a teacher or diplomat, but as a man, "dressed in civilian clothing and without (his) bishop's cross", the Bishop was able to see their lives, their struggles, and most importantly, learn from them the necessity for a kind of conversion that changes one's life. He learned the interconnected nature of a society's poor with their trash, how they were usually treated with the same apathy.

In solidarity with the cartoneros, our family walks the streets of our own neighborhood, hoping that with the grace of solidarity, we too may learn to humbly work and serve the lowliest of our world.

09/05/2021

'Calvary'

When we see suffering, it is often convenient to judge, silver line, or even gossip about someone's pain because it eases our conscience, allowing us to look away from the cross and 'touch it up' so we can bear to see it.

I think we often like to create idealistic imagery of Calvary that shows what we think the glory of God would have looked like on Earth. In doing so, we 'whitewash' the suffering from the cross, because we don't like to see it.

Christ asks us to not turn away, touch the suffering flesh, and join in the suffering. This is solidarity, which leads to understanding, empathy, compassion, and a thirst for righteousness.

~~Available now in our Etsy store~~
https://www.etsy.com/shop/RecycleMission

09/03/2021

New item! Season of Creation Wall Cross; made from 100% recycled HDPE plastic - milk jugs and coffee containers.
Wire hanger is cut from a used guitar string.

Check out in our Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/RecycleMission