1 . Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. heading     B. incredibly     C. adaptable     D. alternative     E. pursuit     F. dumped G. recycled     H. global     I. calculated     J. precisely     K. generated

Planet Plastic

Here’s a shocking statistic. Scientists have calculated the total amount of plastic ever made: 8.3 billion tonnes. Looked at another way, that’s as heavy as 25,000 Empire State Buildings or one billion elephants. And     1    , almost all of it has been made in the last 65 years.

So what’s the problem? Much plastic is in the form of packaging which is used just once and then thrown away. According to a major new study from the University of California, 9% of this is     2    , 12% is burned and 79% goes to landfill. And because most plastic doesn’t biodegrade (生物降解), once it’s in the ground, it stays there.

It’s a situation that has led the paper’s lead author, ecologist Dr. Roland Geyer, to say that we are “rapidly     3     towards ‘Planet Plastic’”. He believes that there’s already enough waste out there to cover the whole of Argentina.

The team behind this report also estimate that eight million tonnes of plastic waste are     4     into the sea every year. This has     5     concern that plastic is entering the food chain through fish and other sea life which consume the smaller pieces.

Of course, the reason why there’s so much plastic around is that it’s an amazingly useful material. We can’t get enough of it. It’s durable and     6    , and is used for everything from yoghurt pots to spaceships. But it’s    7     this quality that makes it a problem. The only way to destroy plastic is to heat or burn it — although this has the side effect of harmful emissions.

So what’s the     8     other than using less plastic? Oceanographer (海洋学家) Dr. Erik van Sebille from Utrecht University says we’re facing a flood of plastic waste, and that the     9     waste industry needs to “get its act together”.

Professor Richard Thompson, a marine biologist from Plymouth University, says it’s poor design that is at fault. He says that if products are currently designed “with recyclability in mind”, they could be recycled around 20 times over.

Dr. Geyer agrees: “The     10     of recycling is to keep material in use and in the cycle forever if you can. But it turns out in our study that actually 90% of that material that did get recycled — which I think we calculated was 600 million tonnes — only got recycled once.”