How you can be more eco-friendly this Lenten season

The holy Lenten season, beginning Wednesday, March 5, is a time when many observers choose to give up daily pleasures during the 40-day period leading up to Easter.

Spending days abstaining from certain foods, alcohol or other indulgences serves as time to reflect and seek forgiveness for many believers in Christian denominations, creating a temporary habit that expires Easter Sunday.

But Sharon Starr, a member of the Sierra Club’s Illinois Chapter and St. Lawrence Episcopal Church in Libertyville, urges the faithful to adopt more eco-friendly habits this Lenten season to reduce their use of single-use plastics — and not just for 40 days.

With that in mind, she has spearheaded the club’s “Take a Pass on Plastics” campaign.

“Anyone can do this,” said Starr of Libertyville. “It’s a nice thing to give up because it’s good for the environment, and good for us health-wise as well.”

Starr created a “Give Up Single-Use Plastic for Lent” calendar, a guide for those looking to be more green. It suggests making day-to-day changes — giving up plastic straws, using reusable food and beverage containers and learning about local recycling rules, for example — in an effort to employ long-term plastic reduction.

“It’s surprisingly easy if you’re intentional about certain things that you do everyday,” Starr said. “The calendar basically focuses on the four R’s — refuse disposable plastic whenever you can, reduce the amount of plastic you use, reuse things you already have, such as durable straws, bags, containers and bottles. And once you can’t refuse, reduce or reuse, you can try to recycle.”

Many Christians believe living green and taking care of the Earth is a religious responsibility. According to Christian Green Living, eco-conscious Lenten practices include giving up newspaper or magazine subscriptions, avoiding purchases of unnecessary consumer items and even giving up time to help those in need.

According to Starr, the only true solution to the world’s plastic problem is reducing the demand for it.

“Recycling is of very limited use. Recycling is expensive, most plastics can’t be recycled, and one-third of plastics are used once and thrown away,” Starr said. “It’s piling up, there’s more and more all the time.”

The plastic problem isn’t just surplus in quantity, said Starr, but it also is a matter of quality in terms of people’s health.

Starr cited a study with mice in which researchers found exposure to microplastics in drinking water caused behavioral changes and alterations in immune markers in liver and brain tissues.

“The mice began exhibiting peculiar behavior akin to dementia in humans. The results were even more pronounced in older animals,” Starr said.

Microplastics are microscopic plastic particles — less than 1/100th the size of a human hair — that are either intentionally manufactured in certain products or have been sloughed off from other items into our food and drinking water, according to Britannica.

“Plastics also have over 10,000 chemicals in them. Most of those chemicals have not been tested for human consumption because they were never intended to be consumed,” Starr said. “Little did we know we were consuming them because they leech out of everything.”

“There is a health issue here that is long-term,” she added. “We’re kind of the first couple of generations to be exposed to it throughout our lives, so to do some long-term studies on this is going to take some time, but it’s clearly a threat to our health.”

Some may consider individual efforts to cut back on plastic waste futile and that one person’s reduction won’t make much of a difference. But it adds up, says Starr, who believes, ultimately, the power to drive change comes in numbers.

“The more people who do it, the more impact it’s going to have,” Starr said. “There are many important applications, particularly medical ones, where plastic is really important and needed. But in the kind of single-use environment consumers live in, it isn’t needed.”

Starr is taking her green Lent calendar on the road, recently giving a presentation on the problems of single-use plastic at Trinity Lutheran Church in Des Plaines.

Starr said the practice of reducing plastic consumption doesn’t have to be an all-at-once strategy, and that her calendar may act as a bridge to living a greener life long-term.

“If you can change the habit for a month, you can do it long-term,” she said.