The problem of electronic waste
We have gradually come to realise that in two ways in particular, modern hi-tech can be bad for the planet. The first is its energy use; the worldwide scale of information technology is so enormous that electronics now produce fully two percent of global carbon emissions, which is about the same as the highly controversial emissions of aeroplanes. The other is the hardware, when it comes to the end of its natural life. This, increasingly, is pretty short. We have hardly noticed this important stream of waste, so much so that a Greenpeace report on the untraced and unreported e-waste two years ago referred to it as “the hidden flow”. We need to be aware of it.
The latest United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report estimates that worldwide, electronic waste is mounting by about 40 million tons a year. So what can we do about it?
The European Union has recognised the problem by adopting a key principle: producer responsibility. In other words, making it the duty of manufacturers of electronic goods to ensure their safe disposal at the end of their lives. In practice, an EU regulation now means that electronics dealers must either take back the equipment they sold you, or help to finance a network of drop-off points, such as public recycling sites. Its main feature is quite ambitious: it aims to deal with “everything with a plug”.
The new UN report suggests that all countries could do something about the problem with a change in design. Groups such as Greenpeace have led the way in putting pressure on major manufacturing companies to find substitutes for the toxic chemicals inside their products. Encouragingly, they have had some success in forcing them to develop non-poisonous alternatives to these. This may be the real way forward.
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Imagine you are out fishing on the high seas - the wind and water are clean and comfortable and you begin bringing up your first catch of the day. That's when everything goes wrong. Your fishing nets are tangled up (缠成一团) in older, abandoned fishing tool, and you're unable to untangle them. Your equipment
Ghost fishing is what abandoned fishing tool does. It still catches fish, but no one benefits. Trapped fish die and attract scavengers (清道夫)
Environmental agencies estimate that 10 percent of all seawater litter is lost or deserted fishing tool
It's not the intention of the majority of fishermen to lose their tool. In most circumstances bad weather is to blame. But in other cases fishermen throw their tool in the ocean on purpose, risking expensive fines. But to them, it's worth the risk
By marking tool with electronic tags and utilizing GPS technology, owners are more likely to recover lost tool and less likely to abandon it. Currently, ownership regulations are reportedly very weak. Leading the effort for tagging fishing tool and creating accountability is the GGTI (Global Ghost Tool Initiative).
Ghost fishing poses a serious threat to the fishing industry worldwide, and a global effort is needed to solve it.
3 . China becomes a world leader in clean technology by fighting environmental pollution, sharing experience.
Erik Solheim, former executive director of the United Nations Environmental Programme, said he is
This is very
He believes that it’s time for the rest of the world to
For Solheim, who is also the former Norwegian Minister of the Environment and Minister of International Development, China’s achievements on the climate and environmental fronts all started with its fight against
“People wanted to see beautiful skies over their cities,” he told China Daily. “The
The latest
Minister of Ecology and Environment Huang Runqiu told a news conference on Sept 15 that the country’s toughest measures and greatest progress on the ecological and environmental front have occurred in the last decade.
He said that
While poor air quality used to be a source of frequent public complaints, the average
About 87.5 percent of days last year were rated as having good air quality, up 6.3 percentage points from 2015, making China the country with the biggest
In the last decade, the
China has has legislated or revised roughly 30 laws and regulations, some of which focused on water resource protection, including the Water Pollution Prevention and Control Law, which was modified in 2017, and the Yangtze River Protection Law, which
| A．confused | B．impressed | C．obsessed | D．connected |
| A．available | B．accessible | C．sustainable | D．substantial |
| A．evident | B．attractive | C．invisible | D．unique |
| A．donating | B．contributing | C．manufacturing | D．distributing |
| A．fall behind | B．put forward | C．look up | D．catch up |
| A．pollution | B．environment | C．ecology | D．emission |
| A．probably | B．inevitably | C．incredibly | D．traditionally |
| A．biological | B．advanced | C．far-reaching | D．green |
| A．study | B．figures | C．technologies | D．innovation |
| A．thanks to | B．despite | C．regardless of | D．other than |
| A．height | B．length | C．concentration | D．weight |
| A．obstacle | B．improvement | C．contribution | D．cultivation |
| A．quality | B．flavor | C．deposit | D．proportion |
| A．accounting | B．making | C．looking | D．applying |
| A．took effect | B．took place | C．took to | D．took in |
4 . They, stretching along the shore, swim quite lovely, looking for underwater greens to feed on. However, in these days, something is mixing with the sea grass that manatees(海牛)like to eat along Florida’s western coast. And it’s making them sick-even killing them.
It’s a poisonous form of algae, which is usually called “red tide” because of its color. Algae are plant-like organisms that live mainly in water. Most are harmless, but red tide is an exception. When it gets mixed in with the grass and the manatees eat it, they get so sick that they can’t even swim.
“They’re basically paralyzed(瘫痪的), and they become unconscious,” said Virginia Emonds, an animal care manager. Manatees are mammals and they need to surface often to breathe in air. If a manatee is paralyzed, it can’t swim and will drown.
As of Monday, the current red tide outbreak has killed at least 184 manatees since the beginning of this year. That has already beaten Florida’s record-high number for manatee deaths in a single year-and we still have nearly nine months to go!
The experts aren’t sure when the red tide outbreak will end. So many more manatees are in danger. The situation has gotten so desperate that Florida zoos have rescued at least a dozen manatees. You can find manatees anywhere from Brazil up to Florida-and throughout much of the Caribbean Sea.
In fact, the manatee is officially considered an endangered species. Thanks to the US government’s protection, Florida’s manatee population has grown to approximately 5,000 in recent years. But the red tide is threatening their survival. Some experts suspect that pollution from farms even might be fueling the red tide outbreak, because fertilizer that’s used on farms often winds up in water. And when that fertilized water runs off into the Gulf of Mexico, it makes things grow faster-just like on land.
1. The word “them” (in the first paragraph) probably refers to “______”.| A．endangered animals | B．manatees |
| C．algae | D．underwater greens |
| A．has caused damage to most of the underwater greens |
| B．serves to cultivate farm lands |
| C．destroy manatees’ ability to surface to breathe |
| D．give rise to 184 manatees’ deaths every month |
| A．The current situation of manatees in Florida. |
| B．The potential cause of the expansion of the red tide. |
| C．The fatal effect of the poisonous red tide on manatees |
| D．The researchers’ efforts to prevent the red tide from spreading. |
| A．The red tide has been changing the manatees’ habitat. |
| B．The red tide has been posing a threat to the manatees. |
| C．The manatee is officially an endangered species. |
| D．More efforts should be put to save the manatees. |
5 . Eradajere Oleita thinks she may have a partial solution for two of American’s persistent problems: garbage and poverty. It’s called the Chip Bag Project. The 26-year-old student and environmentalist from Detroit is asking a favor of local snack lovers: Rather than toss your empty chip bags into the trash, donate them so she can turn them into sleeping bags for the homeless.
Chip eaters drop off their empty bags from Doritos, Lay’s, and other favorites at two locations in Detroit: a print shop and a clothing store, where Oleita and her volunteer helpers collect them. After they sanitize the chip bags in soapy hot water, they slice them open, lay them flat, and iron them together. They use padding and liners from old coats to line the insides.
It takes about four hours to sew a sleeping bag, and each takes around 150 to 300 chip bags, depending on whether they’re single-serve or family size. The result is a sleeping bag that is “waterproof, lightweight, and easy to carry around,” Oleita told the Detroit News.
Since its start in 2020, the Chip Bag Project has collected more than 800,000 chip bags and, as of last December, created 110 sleeping bags. Sure, it would be simpler to raise the money to buy new sleeping bags. But that’s only half the goal for Oleita — whose family moved to the United States from Nigeria a decade ago with the hope of attaining a better life — and her fellow volunteers. “They are dedicated to making an impact not only socially, but environmentally,” she says.
And, of course, there’s the symbolism of salvaging bags that would otherwise land in the trash and using them to help the homeless. It’s a powerful reminder that environmental injustice and poverty often go hand in hand. As Oleita told the media: “I think it’s time to show connections between all of these issues.”
1. What does the Chip Bag Project call on people to do?| A．To throw empty chip bags into dustbins |
| B．To bring empty chip bags to appointed locations |
| C．To donate them to those homeless |
| D．To sanitize empty chip bags for recycle |
| A．charge | B．protect | C．load | D．fill |
| A．To lead a better life with her immigrated family in U.S.A |
| B．To launch a charity project with other volunteers in school time. |
| C．To make a difference both socially and environmentally. |
| D．To help those homeless by giving them handmade sleeping bags. |
| A．adaptable and extroverted |
| B．creative and warm-hearted |
| C．aggressive and capable |
| D．modest and generous |
6 . THE GLOBAL WASTE TRADE IS ESSENTIALLY BROKEN
Cut into hillside in northern Malaysia stands a large, open-air warehouse. This is a recycling factory, which opened last November. On a very hot afternoon in January, Shahid Ali was working his very first week on the job. He stood knee-deep in soggy, white bits of plastic. Around him, more bits floated of the conveyor belt and fell to the ground like snowflakes.
Hour after hour, Ali sorts through the plastic jumble moving down the belt, picking out pieces that look off-color or soiled-rejects (废品) in the recycling process. Though it looks like backbreaking work, Ali says it is a great improvement over his previous job, folding bed-sheets in a nearby textile factory, for much lower pay. Now, if he eats simply, he can save money from his wages of just over $l an hour and send $250 a month to his parents and six brothers and sisters in Peshawar, Pakistan, 2,700 miles away, “As soon as I heard about this work, I asked for a job,” says Ali, 24, a bearded man with glasses and an easy smile. Still, he’s working 12 hours a day, seven days a week. “If I take a day off, I lose a day’s wages,” he says.
In the warehouse, hundreds of bags are stacked more than 60 feet high-each stuffed with plastic wrappers and bags thrown away weeks earlier by their original users in California. The fact that the waste has traveled to this distant corner of the planet in the first place shows how badly the global recycling economy has failed to keep pace with humanity’s plastics addiction. This is an ecosystem that is deeply dysfunctional, if not on the point of collapse: About 90% of the millions of tons of plastic the world produces every year will eventually end up not recycled, but burned, buried, or dumped.
Plastic recycling enjoys ever-wider support among consumers: Putting yogurt containers and juice bottles in a blue bin is an eco-friendly act of faith in millions of households. But faith goes only so far. The tidal wave of plastic items that enters the recycling stream each year is increasingly likely to fall right back out again, casualties of a broken market. Many products that consumers believe (and industries claim) are “recyclable" are in reality not, because of hard economics. With oil and gas prices near 20-year lows, so-called virgin plastic, a product of petroleum feed-stocks, is now far cheaper and easier to obtain than recycled material. That unforeseen shift has yanked the financial rug out from under what was until recently a practical recycling industry. “The global waste trade is essentially broken,” says the head of the global plastics campaign at Greenpeace. “We are sitting on vast amounts of plastic with nowhere to send it and nothing to do with it.”
1. What is the author’s attitude towards Shahid Ali?| A．Critical. | B．Merciless. | C．Indifferent. | D．Sympathetic. |
| A．The prices of oil and gas have been increasing. |
| B．Tons of wastes travel so far before being recycled. |
| C．Recyclable products are not really recycled. |
| D．Governments don’t support the recycling industry. |
| A．Out of stock. | B．Far from pleased. | C．Full of energy. | D．Out of order. |
| A．To illustrate how plastic waste has been recycled in the world. |
| B．To warn people that the global waste trade is essentially broken. |
| C．To analyze the relationship between consumers and factories. |
| D．To solve the conflict between the recycling industry and governments. |
| A．Signing up members. | B．Organizing protests. |
| C．Acting as its spokesman. | D．Saving endangered animals. |
| A．Anti-nuclear campaigns. | B．Removing industrial waste. |
| C．Surveying the Atlantic Ocean floor. | D．Anti-animal-abuse demonstrations. |
| A．By engaging in violence. | B．By disturbing them. |
| C．By appealing to the public. | D．By taking legal action. |
| A．Reserved. | B．Uninterested. |
| C．Doubtful. | D．Supportive. |
A walk along Shanghai’s Suzhou Creek was, for much of the 20th century, best undertaken with a handkerchief covered firmly over the nose. Liquid waste from factories poured directly into its waters. For the multi-generational families who lived in the small boats that crowded its waters from bank to bank, it had long doubled as a source of public drinking water and a sewer. Infectious diseases
Suzhou Creek has taken on an entirely new look in recent years. The once-smelly and disease-ridden riverside
The restoration of Suzhou Creek dates back to 1993,
Research from the U.N. Environment Program reveals that half of the world’s 500 largest rivers have been seriously depleted or polluted. The comprehensive cleanup project for the 125-kilometer-long Suzhou Creek is an example the world
Stage Four of the Suzhou Creek restoration project is in full swing. Its aim is to make the creek’s waterfront
That means visitors will still be able to stroll Suzhou Creek from the 1911 Garden Bridge to the 1924 Post Office,
9 . A simple piece of rope hangs between some environmentally friendly Americans and their neighbors. On one side stand those who have begun to see clothes dryers as a wasteful consumers of energy (up to 6% of total electricity) and powerful emitters of carbon dioxide (up to a ton of CO2 per household every year). As an alternative, they are turning to clotheslines as part of what Alexander Lee, an environmentalist, calls “what-I-can-do environmentalism.”
But the other side are people who oppose air-drying laundry outside on visual grounds. Increasingly, they have persuaded community and homeowners associations (HOAs) access the U.S. to ban outdoor clotheslines, which they say not only look unattractive but also lower surrounding property values. Those actions, in turn, have led to a right-to-dry movement that is pressing for making laws to protect the choice to use clotheslines. Only three states — Florida, Hawaii and Utah — have laws written broadly enough to protect clotheslines. Right-to-dry advocates argue that there should be more.
Matt Reck is the kind of eco-conscious guy who feeds his trees with bathwater and recycles condensation drops (冷凝水) from his air conditioners to water plants. His family also uses a clothesline. But Otto Hagen, president of Reck’s HOA in Wake Forest, N.C., notified him that a neighbor had complained about his line. The Recks ignored the warning and still dry their clothes on a rope in the yard. “Many people claim to be environmentally friendly but don’t take matters into their own hands,” says Reck. HOAs Hagen has decided to hold off taking action. “I’m not going to go crazy,” he says. “But if Matt keeps his line and more neighbors complains, I’ll have to address it again.”
North Carolina lawmakers tried and failed earlier this year to insert language into an energy bill that would expressly prevent HOAs from regulating clotheslines. But the issue remains a touchy one with HOAs and real estate agents. “Most visual restrictions are rooted. to a degree, in the belief that homogenous (统一协调的) external appearance are supportive of property value,” says Sara Stubbins, executive director of the Community Association Institute’s North Carolina chapter. In other words, associations worry that housing prices will fall if prospective buyers think their would-be neighbors are too poor to afford dryers.
Alexander Lee dismisses the notion that clotheslines devalue property advocating that the idea “needs to change in light of global warming.” “We all have to do at least something to decrease our carbon footprint,” Alexander Lee says.
1. What is NOT mentioned as a disadvantage of using clothes dryers?| A．Electricity consumption. | B．Air pollution. |
| C．Waste of energy. | D．Ugly looking. |
| A．Opposers think air-drying laundry would devalue surrounding property. |
| B．Opposers consider the outdoor clothesline as an eyesore to the scenery. |
| C．Right-to-dry movements led to the pass of written laws to protect clotheslines. |
| D．Most of states in the US have no written laws to protect clotheslines. |
| A．clotheslines should be banned in the community |
| B．clotheslines wouldn’t lessen the property values |
| C．the globe would become warmer and warmer |
| D．we should protect the environment in the community |
| A．Opinions on Environmental Protection | B．Opinions on Air-drying Laundry |
| C．What-I-Can-Do Environmentalism | D．Restrictions on Clotheslines |
10 . Directions: Read the following three passages. Summarize the main idea and the main point(s) of the passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words as far as possible.
IKEA, known around the world as a supplier of furniture and other home goods, is taking steps to protect the environment. By 2030 IKEA plans to be a circular business, one whose products can all be reused or recycled rather than thrown away. To achieve this goal, the company is redesigning all of its products. How can it design products that will last longer and be easier to fix and that people can recycle when they are finished with them? By answering these questions, IKEA hopes to improve the sustainability of its business model.
IKEA wants people to be able to repair its products rather than throw them away when something goes wrong. To accomplish that goal, the company is standardizing the parts, materials and colors that it uses. This means that if a part needs to be replaced, it will be easy to find. In the past IKEA has only offered spare parts for some products; now it is greatly expanding the number of spare parts customers can purchase. This makes it feasible for customers to repair their own furniture. IKEA is also redesigning the parts of its products that are most likely to wear out quickly.
To extend the life of its products, IKEA is trying to make their maintenance easier. It is also making its products easier to take apart and transport, so the furniture is less likely to break when being moved or changing hands.
Sometimes people replace their furniture not because there is something wrong with it, but because their needs have changed. So IKEA is also trying to help people keep furniture for a longer time by making it easy to modify. Some pieces can be expanded or reduced in size as family members and guests come and go. Others have covers that can be exchanged for different look.
But even with all these efforts, it is likely that certain products will eventually no longer be usable. At that point they can be remanufactured — the pieces reassembled (重新组装) into something new-or recycled. And IKEA is designing products to make these processes easier. The company is also working to reduce waste in other areas, such as packaging and food waste from restaurants inside its stores.
These efforts to reduce the number of IKEA products that are abandoned and thrown in landfills will help create a more environmentally friendly economy.
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