In Grimshaw’s song Cafe corner she says can I play with the big kids now. When I was at a revival event in Tenterfield I was watching some kids climb the steps and run across the stage and I heard one of them say something along the lines of can I play with the big kids and it was a line I had been shown in my dream about being able to minister at a greater capacity. God has given me lines out of her songs in dreams to minister healing to my heart. This song cafe corner means a lot to me as I have been really wounded as have many by gossip. In one of the lines of her songs she talks about people talking about each other rather then to each other. This is such a damaging sin our words have power of life or death and we need to be so careful what we say about each other. Next time you go to have a coffee in a cafe see how many good things you can talk about to build each other up rather then talking about each other and pulling each other down.
One of the essays I have just written is about coffee, here is some of it that highlights some issues to help the environment but more importantly some ideas to help us clean up our emotional environment.
After watching a presentation on the waste that is occurring with coffee cups I became obsessed with the topic. I did what they asked and every time I went to a café I made requests for them to change their behavior and I tried to change mine including lecturing the assistants about it as I drove through McDonald’s. I started to get some ideas about this topic on how if it was made fun and innovative the issue might get resolved faster.
There are so many facts about this issue that once known its hard to just go and have a coffee and not take responsibility. Its pretty clear that there is a love for the culture of takeaway coffee. It has become part of our routines so how can we design a fun way to change the habits that are not healthy for our environment? One concept is having a fee for using the disposable cup to encourage people to use their own and there are many places that sell the keep cups.
Even though some of the cups are recyclable there is a percentage of them not being recycled due to the way they are produced. Coffee cups lined with plastic for example tightly bonded with the paper so that they can hold the liquid become harder to recycle. Some plastics take hundreds of years to break down so depending on the material used this could be a contributing issue. As the plastics break down there can then be a related issue where animals are effected by ingesting the plastic elements. Another way to think about it is the amount that goes into the tree growth and then destruction to make the coffee cup for the length of time it is used could be compared to asking people if they would still eat meet if they had to kill the animal themselves, many of us would not be able to cope with it.
Here are some facts that demonstrate the severity of the issue: 16 billion paper cups each year are used which means that 6.5 million trees are cut down. 4 billion gallens of water and enough energy to power 54,000 homes are also used in the process. Another fact I found said that 7000 tonnes of non recyclable waste is created by disposable cups.The type of things War on Waste suggest to do as actions to reduce the issue are some of the things I have been doing and include having a conversation with your local cafes, tell them about the issue and they can register to be a responsible café. Also telling your council they can join the program to help roll it out in local cafes. Informing people in your social circles including social media about the issue or take a survey on the war on waste and share how you feel. I also found out that over 1 billion coffee cups from 720,510 trees are made just in Australia and that is not inclusive of the ones we import from third world nations and guess what we are helping them destroy their old growth forests to feed our addiction. After plastic bottles guess which cup is next highest on the list of recycling problems. Richard Fine founder of biodegradable coffee cup manufacturing company Biopak 10 years ago estimated 90% of disposable cups ending up in landfill which means about 60,000 kg of plastic waste per year and Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson said that plastic in oceans was the biggest global pollution problem.
Recently this topic came to my attention in a different kind of way. Someone told me about an artwork they made from a vision and it was that people were taking one cup and going to a river and filling up that cup, but Jesus was saying there is so much more for you to drink why are you only having one cup. It was referring to finding refreshing in his living water. The kind of thirst we really have cant be quenched with a late’, cappuccino or chai fix, and if we really want an answer to this war on waste the only real answer is to drink more of Jesus love then we wont need to go looking for other things to fill the void of what we really need. Have a coffee with Jesus today and ask him what addictions are influencing your behavior and invite him into the waste issues in your life.
Some of articles used in research:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-03/takeaway-coffee-cups-piling-up-in-landfill/7136926
https://www.facebook.com/ABCTV/videos/1489833234372650
https://www.helpscout.net/25-ways-to-thank-your-customers/
https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/2015/06/the-effects-of-paper-coffee-cups-on-the-environment
