单选题 Paper or Plastic?
Take a walk along the Chesapeake Bay, and you are likely to see plastic bags floating in the water. Ever since these now ubiquitous symbols of American super-consumption showed up in the supermarkets, plastic shopping bags have made their 1 into local waterways, and from there, into the bay, where they can 2 wildlife. Piles of them—the 3 takes centuries to decompose—show up in landfills and on city streets. Plastic bags also take an environmental toll in the form of millions of barrels of oil expended every year to produce them.
Enter Annapolis 4 you will see plastic bags distributed free in department stores and supermarkets. Alderman Sam Shropshire has introduced a well-meaning proposal to ban retailers 5 distributing plastic shopping bags in Maryland"s capital. Instead, retailers would be required to offer bags 6 recycled paper and to sell reusable bags. The city of Baltimore is considering a similar measure. Opponents of the idea, however, argue that 7 bags are harmful, too: they cost more to make, they consume more 8 to transport, and recycling them causes more pollution than recycling plastic. The argument for depriving Annapolis residents of their plastic bags is 9 accepted. Everyone in this 10 is right about one thing: disposable shopping bags of any type are 11 , and the best outcome would be for customers to reuse bags instead. Annapolis"s mayor is investigating how to hand out free, reusable shopping bags to city residents, a proposal that can proceed regardless of whether other bags are banned. A less-expensive 12 would be to encourage retailers to give discounts to customers 13 bring their own reusable bags, a policy that a spokesman for the supermarket Giant Food says its chain already has in place. And this policy would be more 14 if stores imitated furniture mega-retailer Ikea and charged for disposable bags at the checkout counter. A broad ban on the use of plastic shopping bags, which would merely replace some forms of pollution with others, is not the 15 .