1 . Can plastic recycling reduce the import of oil? The United States Environmental Protection Agency says only seven percent of plastic waste in the United States is recycled each year. A new company in northern New York says it can increase that percentage. It also says it can help the United States reduce the amount of oil it imports.

The company has a machine called the “plastic-eating monster”. Every hour, thousands of kilograms of milk jugs, water bottles, and grocery bags are fed into the machine. The plastic waste comes from landfills across the United States.

John Bordynuik runs the company, called JBI Inc. Mr. Bordynuik has invented a new process of turning plastic into fuel. First, many different kinds of unwashed plastics are melted together. Mr. Bordynuik uses a special chemical to turn the fluid into a vapor. This reduces the plastic to its most basic elements. “Plastics are just long hydrocarbon chains. What we’re doing is re-forming them into links and chains that we want so they have a high fuel value.” Eight percent of the recycled plastic is used to run the system. Independent testers say eighty-six percent of what goes in comes out as fuel.

JBI produces several thousand liters of fuel a day. It creates different grades of fuel for different industries. It sells the fuel for up to one hundred dollars a barrel(桶). Each barrel costs about ten dollars to produce. John Bordynuik believes plastics will become an important source of fuel for the United States. He says this will reduce the country’s dependence on foreign oil and reduce the amount of plastic waste in its landfills.

Scientists say plastic-to-oil technology is still new and developing. They say it is not yet known if the process is environmentally friendly. And some question whether turning plastic into oil can even be considered “recycling”. Carson Maxted says because there is a lot of plastic waste and a great demand for oil, JBI’s recycling technology may create great changes in both industries. “So they’re getting value from something that would otherwise go to the landfill, things that wouldn’t be accepted into a recycling plant.”

3 . A thirty-year-old environmental puzzle has finally been solved. Since the 1990s, pieces of plastic telephones that look like Garfield—the lazy cartoon cat—have been ______ up on beaches in France. But for three ______, no one knew where the phones were coming from. On March 22, a group of volunteers from a coastal clean-up organization, along with two journalists finally found out the ______ to their puzzle. They discovered a(n) ______ shipping container and ______ of several Garfield phones inside a rocky sea cave. The cave is hard to find, and can only be ______ when the tide (sea) is low.

Shipping containers are used to move things like food, clothing and other items ______ the sea. Cargo ships ______ hundreds of the huge steel containers from the countries where the goods are made or grown, to the countries where they will be ______. However, ______ knows for sure how the shipping container full of Garfield phones ended up in the ______.

People who live in the area say that the ______ first showed up on beaches ______ a big storm in the early 1990s. The container ______ fell off a ship during the storm, but nobody ever reported that it was ______.

The Garfield phones have become a symbol of the problem of ocean ______ Fabien Boileau is the director of Iroise Marine Natural Park, where the cave with the phones is ______. He said the Garfield phones help people to ______ that plastic trash doesn't ______ in the ocean. Some of the colourful plastic pieces still look almost ______, even though they were washed overboard more than 30 years ago.