【推荐1】Starting in the late 1980s, the plastics industry spent tens of millions of dollars encouraging recycling through ads and recycling projects, telling people plastics could be recycled, but their own internal records showed that industry officials long knew that plastic recycling on a large scale comes with high costs but poor results.

A report sent to top industry directors in 1973 said that plastic recycling was not as easy as people thought and sorting plastic was impractical. Another document a year later showed that there was serious doubt that plastic recycling can get profits on an economic basis.

Despite this, three former top officials said the industry supports recycling as a way to beat back a growing trend of stopping using plastics in the 1980s. “The plastics industry is under fire, but we want to continue to make plastic products,” Thomas, an official from a company making plastics says.“ If the public think the recycling is working, then they’re not going to be so worried about the environment.”

“The public gradually doubt the idea that the plastics industry could do a satisfying job in dealing with plastics and protecting the environment. But now we have already funded new technologies to change this situation. We don’t want to see the pollution of the environment either and are willing to solve the problem,” says Jim Becker, vice president of Chevron Phillips Plastics Company.

However, the more plastics are recycled, the less money the industry will make. And the industry now produces many more different kinds of plastics that are more costly to sort and in many cases can’t be recycled at all. Efforts to reduce the use of plastics are increasing worldwide, but any plan to slow the growth of plastics will cause the whole industry to lose billions of dollars in the future.

【推荐2】Some parents worry kids spend a lot of time looking at screens. But a new study argues against that unease parents may feel. “The danger is that they’re hearing a message that social media use is causing very serious and harmful problems like depression and anxiety. Candice Odgers, professor at the University of California, explained. And the idea is that if you shut off social media, which lots of kids use to connect with each other and find out information, you could in fact be making a situation worse. ”

Odgers and her colleagues looked at the screen-related behavior of 400 public-school students in North Carolina aged 10 to 14. The researchers found that—even not counting time doing schoolwork on screens—the kids spent between almost 5 hours to 7 hours per day on their devices. “Overall，what we find is no connection between the amount of time that young people spend online and mental health symptoms like depression, anxiety”. What they actually found was something jaw-dropping. Young people who sent more text messages reported better mental health. Odgers was not alone there. Journal Clinical Psychological Science recently announced, “people who use technology in the positive ways to stay connected off-line often, are more connected online as well and experiencing better mental health.”

So why are the fears about screen time? Odgers argues that the methodologies (方法论）for older studies may have led to false conclusions. “One of the methods that’s been done to date has been asking students to recall   “How often are you online?” and “ Have you ever felt depressed?” And the correlation between those two things has been used to spread a lot of fear about this connection between social media use and things like depression, 99. 5 percent of the reasons that kids differ in their depression is due to something other than the time they spend online though.”

Parents get a lot of advice, and some of it always seems to conflict. “The hope is that more parents will hear this message and relax and spend kind of less time worrying about smartphones and more time just talking to their kids.”