If you are new to our Unitarian Universalist faith community and wondering what’s with people carrying in all those milk bags on a Sunday morning and depositing them into the labelled cardboard box sitting on the wheelchair in the cloakroom, stay tuned!
Reflect on Tim Cook’s, “The Ripple Effect – Be the pebble in the pond that creates the ripple for change.” Unitarian Universalists are mindful of how everything is interconnected. Every small part fits into the whole.
Bill Ratcliffe’s cousin has been organizing the weaving of mats for a number of years, as part of a larger project of the Rotary Club of Grand Bend called the Global Literacy Program. Our UU Congregation has been involved for about six years.
One way to reduce global plastic pollution is to stop discarding our large milk bags. These milk bags can be reused to make useful woven mats. Just to clarify, the milk bags are the large ones with print on the outside and not the three small clear ones inside. It is important that they not be scrunched up but clean, dry and flattened for easy processing.
The collected bags are woven into mats by several women in the area of St. Joseph, Ontario, a small hamlet, north of Grand Bend. The process consists of consecutive steps. First the bags are flattened and inspected. The bags are then cut into strips to be woven into mats on homemade looms. Each mat uses 140-150 milk bags, depending on the thickness of the mat. When there is a shipping container full of mats and various literacy materials, it is sent to destinations in Africa such as Uganda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana and Rwanda. The mats are used on the ground, in schools and at home, to reduce parasitic infections. The containers are then repurposed into school classrooms and libraries.
For the last year or so, the mats are also used by people who are homeless, in South-Western Ontario. Due to this development, the completed mats are equally distributed between the two programs.
We would like to thank all of you who have continued to collect milk bags over the years, and have dropped them off in the designated box at the Meeting House Cloak Room, at our residence or have requested a pick up. For those who are interested in starting to collect milk bags, please contact Linda and Bill Ratcliffe at 519-471-7500 or at wratcliffe@sympatico.ca, with any questions that you may have.
This is one small effort that we can easily do that reverberates here in South-Western Ontario, as well as, across the world.
In closing, thank you again to all of our long time milk bag collectors and welcome to our new ones. Your caring and commitment are greatly appreciated.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
In gratitude,
Linda and Bill Ratcliffe