填空题
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions
14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.
Is it time to halt the rising tide of plastic
packaging?
A. Close up, plastic packaging can be
a marvellous thing. Those who make a living from it call it a forgotten
infrastructure that allows modern urban life to exist. Plastics have helped
society defy natural limits such as the seasons, the rotting of food and the
distance most of us live from where our food is produced. And yet we do not like
it. Partly we do not like waste, but plastic waste, with its hydrocarbon roots
and industrial manufacture, is especially galling. In 2008, the UK, for example,
produced around two million tonnes of plastic waste, twice as much as in the
early 1990s. The very qualities of plastic - its cheapness, its indestructible
aura - make it a reproachful symbol of an unsustainable way of life. The facts,
however, do not justify our unease. All plastics are, at least theoretically,
recyclable. Plastic packaging makes up just 6 to 7 per cent of the contents of
British dustbins by weight and less than 3 per cent of landfill. Supermarkets
and brands, which are under pressure to reduce the quantity of packaging of all
types that they use, are finding good environmental reasons to turn to plastic:
it is lighter, so requires less energy for transportation than glass, for
example; it requires relatively little energy to produce; and it is often
re-usable. An Austrian study found that if plastic packaging were removed from
the supply chain, other packaging would have to increase fourfold to make up for
it.
B. So are we just wrong about plastic packaging? Is it time
to stop worrying and learn to love the disposable plastic wrapping around
sandwiches? Certainly there are bigger targets for environmental savings such as
improving household insulation and energy emissions. Naturally, the plastics
industry is keen to point them out. What's more, concern over plastic packaging
has produced a squall of conflicting initiatives from retailers, manufacturers
and local authorities. It's a squall that dies down and then blows harder from
one month to the next. 'It is being left to the individual conscience and
supermarkets playing the market" says Tim Lang, a professor specialising in food
policy. 'It's a mess,
C. Dick Searle of the Packaging
Federation points out that societies without sophisticated packaging lose half
their food before it reaches consumers and that in the UK, waste in supply
chains is about 3 per cent. In India, it is more than 50 per cent. The
difference comes later: the British throw out 30 per cent of the food they buy -
an environmental cost in terms of emissions equivalent to a fifth of the cars on
their roads. Packagers agree that cardboard, metals and glass all have their
good points, but there's nothing quite like plastic. With more than 20 families
of polymers to choose from and then sometimes blend, packaging designers and
manufacturers have a limitless variety of qualities to play with.
D. But if there is one law of plastic that, in environmental terms at
least, prevails over all others, it is this: a little goes a long way. This
means, first, that plastic is relatively cheap to use - it represents just over
one-third of the UK packaging market by value but it wraps more than half the
total number of items bought. Second, it means that even though plastic encases
about 53 per cent of products bought, it only makes up 20 per cent by weight of
the packaging consumed. And in the packaging equation, weight is the main issue
because the heavier something is, the more energy you expend moving it around.
In view of this, righteous indignation against plastic can look
foolish.
E. One store commissioned a study to find precise data
on which had less environmental impact: selling apples loose or ready-wrapped.
Helene Roberts, head of packaging, explains that in fact they found apples in
fours on a tray covered by plastic film needed 27 per cent less packaging in
transportation than those sold loose. Steve Kelsey, a packaging designer, finds
the debate frustrating. He argues that the hunger to do something quickly is
diverting effort away from more complicated questions about how you truly alter
supply chains. Rather than further reducing the weight of a plastic bottle, more
thought should be given to how packaging can be recycled. Helene Roberts
explains that their greatest packaging reduction came when the company switched
to re-usable plastic crates and stopped consuming 62,000 tonnes of cardboard
boxes every year. Plastic packaging is important, and it might provide a way of
thinking about broader questions of sustainability. To target plastic on its own
is to evade the complexity of the issues. There seems to be a universal
eagerness to condemn plastic. Is this due to an inability to make the general
changes in society that are really required? 'Plastic as a lightweight food
wrapper is now built in as the logical thing,' Lang says. 'Does that make it an
environmentally sound system of packaging? It only makes sense if you have a
structure such as exists now. An environmentally driven packaging system would
look completely different.' Dick Searle put the challenge another way. 'The
amount of packaging used today is a reflection of modern life"
Questions 14-18
Reading Passage 2 has five
paragraphs A-E.
Choose the correct heading for each
paragraph, A-E, from the list of headings below.
Write
the correct number, i-viii, in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
i——A
lack of consistent policy
ii——Learning from
experience
iii——The greatest advantage
iv——The
role of research
v——A unique material
vi——An
irrational anxiety
vii——Avoiding the real challenges
viii——A sign of things to come