To get a chocolate out of a box requires a considerable amount of unpacking: the box has to be taken out of the paper bag in which it arrived; the cellophane wrapper has to be tom off,the lid opened and the paper removed; the chocolate itself then has to be unwrapped from its own piece of paper. But this insane amount of wrapping is not confined to luxuries. It is now becoming increasingly difficult to buy anything that is not done up in cellophane, polythene, or paper.
A machine has been developed that pulps paper then processes it into packaging, e.g. egg-boxes and cartons. This could be easily adapted for local authority use. It would mean that people would have to separate their refuse into paper and non-paper, with a different dustbin for each. Paper is, in fact, probably the material that can be most easily recycled; and now, with massive increases in paper prices, the time has come at which collection by local authorities could be profitable.
Recycling of this kind is already happening with milk bottles, which are returned to the dairies, washed out, and refilled. But both glass and paper are being threatened by the growing use of plastic. More and more dairies are experimenting with plastic bottles, and it has been estimated that if all the milk bottles necessary were made of plastic, then British dairies would be producing the equivalent of enough plastic tubing to encircle the earth every five or six days!
The trouble with plastic is that it does not rot. Some environmentalists argue that the only solution to the problem of ever growing mounds of plastic containers is to do away with plastic altogether in the shops, a suggestion unacceptable to many manufacturers who say there is no alternative to their handy plastic packs.
1.“This insane amount of wrapping is not confined to luxuries” (line 4) means( ).
2.The “local authorities” are ( ).
3.If paper is to be recycled ( ).
4.British dairies are ( ).
5.The environmentalists think that( ).