1 . Music festivals are highly popular events during the summer months, attracting thousands of festival-goers who camp on-site. However, the question arises as to whether the tents left behind can be recycled.

While some festival organizers claim that they recycle the tents, the answer is not so straightforward. Every year, thousands of tents are abandoned (拋弃) at festivals, and it’s not just post-festival laziness or poor weather that is to blame. According to a recent survey, many festival-goers leave their tents behind because they believe they will be donated to charities. But unfortunately, this is only wishful thinking.

Matt Wedge, the director of Festival Waste Reclamation & Distribution, says that the number of tents left behind is increasing, estimating that around 20% of the tents at this year’s Leeds Festival were abandoned, which amounted to about 7,000 tents. He adds that Reading and Leicester festivals are usually just as bad but twice as big, meaning that 14,000 tents could have been abandoned there.

In terms of addressing this problem, one popular idea is to employ a tent deposit scheme (保证金计划). Under this scheme, festival-goers would pay a deposit to bring their tent to the festival, which would be returned to them if they take their tent home. “A similar thing happens with litter. Some festivals make attendees pay a £10 ‘eco bond’, which will be returned to them if they fill up a bag of rubbish and hand it in at the end of the festival,” he adds.

The shocking images of abandoned tents are more than just a comment on the environmental impacts of the festival itself. They are in fact a dramatic symbol of our throwaway culture. Just as images of clean fields at Glastonbury represent a refreshing sign of hope for what could be, the ultimate (最后的) message is to make it a habit to take your tent home at least. It’s the best thing people can do.

2 . Animals being extinct from the Earth is a serious issue. When this happens in order to use their fur or skin for fashion, it is even worse, since it’s not even for a matter of human survival. That’s why a London zoo decided to make a powerful statement at the Siamese crocodile enclosure (鳄鱼围栏).

When visitors come in expecting to see a crocodile, they’re greeted with the handbag instead, making a very effective and powerful point about illegal wildlife trade and the harm it takes on the species involved.

A sign by the enclosure reads, “This bag used to be found swimming in slow-moving rivers and streams across Southeast Asia and Indonesia. Over the last 75 years, more than 80% of Siamese crocodiles have disappeared. Many, like this one, were hunted for their skins as part of the illegal wildlife trade.”.

Native to parts of Southeast Asia, Siamese crocodiles are critically endangered and have become virtually extinct in the wild. Due to hunting as well as habitat loss, they are now absent from nearly 99% of their original range. A huge part of the decline of population is due to humans using their wetland habitat for rice farming, and things only took a turn for the worse when large-scale hunting for their skin for commercial purposes began in the 1950s.

The particular handbag that is on display at the zoo was confiscated at a UK airport, according to Benjamin Tapley, leader of reptiles and amphibians at ZSL London Zoo.

Tapley told The Huffington Post, “We made this exhibit, within ZSL London Zoo’s Reptile House, to draw visitors’ attention to the destructive impact the Illegal Wildlife Trade (IWT) is having on species around the world. At ZSL, we are working globally with governments and local communities to protect wildlife, support law enforcement (执法) that targets illegal trade networks, empower local communities affected by IWT and reduce demand for threatened wildlife.”

3 . Growing up in Canterbury, Scartozzi recalls swimming in rivers as part of her childhood. When she returned many years later, however, she noticed things had changed. “Some of the places where I could swim before now have signs saying ‘polluted water, do not swim’,” she says. “I wanted to take my kids to places to swim but we couldn’t because these signs were up.”

Although the experience was sad and surprising, it has also served as fuel for Scartozzi, who’s now focusing on restoring the health of waterways. Her company called eCleanEnvirotech is developing technology to remove pollutants from waterways such as rivers, ponds and streams. It involves feeding polluted water into a system housing microbes (微生物) that eat or break up the pollutants.

The “engineered” nature of the technology, Scartozzi explains, means it’s adaptable for different environment conditions. Each system can be personalized with its own unique “soup” of microbes to remove the pollutants in any waterway where it is installed (安装).

Other advantages of the technology, she says, are that it can process water relatively quickly and that it can be used to treat waterways in a variety of sizes and locations.

She says she hopes to create cleaner water for the benefit of future generations. “My passion is around restoring the health of these waterways. And my purpose is to do anything that I can to return them to their former condition. That’s what drives me every day. If I can do anything, it is so that in the future, my kids and grandchildren have somewhere where they can go swimming and fishing.”

5 . A Swedish company came up with a creative and cheap way to clean up its streets: to hire birds. Crows, especially, have been trained to collect cigarette butts (烟头) off roadways and put them in a machine that rewards the clever birds.

The pilot project called Corvid Cleaning comes from The Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation and aims to lower the cost of street cleaning in the city of Sodertalje.

Founder Christian Gunther-Hansen thought crows would be the best choice because they are very clever. “They are easier to teach and there is also a higher chance for them to learn from each other,” he told Swedish news agency TT. “At the same time, they have a lower risk of eating any rubbish by mistake”.

The birds are trained through a step-by-step process to pick up rubbish and place it into a machine that offers them food.

Tomas Thernstrom, a waste expert for the Sodertalje Municipality, said one of the most interesting things about the project was that crows could be taught to pick up cigarette butts but humans can’t learn not to throw them on the ground in the first place.

Water is a precious resource. Every person needs it     1     (survive), and we use it for cooking, drinking, growing our food and washing. However, it is scarce (缺乏的). Just 1% of water on Earth can     2     (use) by humans. What’s more, treating water to make it clean and safe and pumping it to our homes uses up lots of energy. So, what can you do to help save water? One easy way is by     3     (turn) off the tap when you brush your teeth.