1 . We’ve all been there, trying our best to do our bit to help save the planet, when a really essential item that you had to order online arrives in such an unbelievable amount of packaging that it makes you feel like it’s an unprepared game of passing the parcel.
It’s made even worse by the fact that some of the packaging can’t be recycled. In fact, 10 million tonnes of packaging waste are produced in the UK every year. A lot of this ends up in landfill, two-thirds of which could have instead been recovered.
The good news, however, is that how packaging waste is managed is in for a BIG shake-up in line with the “polluter pays principle”. By placing the main point of duty to pay on brand owners, they will be encouraged to choose more sustainable packaging options which are recyclable and reusable as much as possible. Otherwise, they will have to pay higher fees.
This is a system known as Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) — meaning that those who have control over packaging design decisions will be encouraged to do the right thing for the planet at the beginning and consider what happens at the end of the packaging’s life from the start.
What this means is that instead of local authorities picking up the bill for household waste management, companies will have instead to pay for managing your household packaging waste as well as the form businesses, and they will be met with the associated little costs too.
And, as an added bonus, the new EPR laws on packaging will also mean that producers are required to put clear mandatory (强制性的) labelling on packaging, for example, this could be “RECYCLE” or “DO NOT RECYCLE”. Of course, we hope that the “DO NOT RECYCLE” category labelling is the minority. It is aimed that by 2030, 78% of packaging will be recycled in the UK.
1. What can we know from the first two paragraphs?| A．Two-thirds of packaging waste is recycled. |
| B．Over-packaging is often the case in life. |
| C．The quality of goods cannot be guaranteed. |
| D．Online shopping is getting less popular. |
| A．Designers. | B．Producers. | C．Customers. | D．Local authorities. |
| A．Pay higher taxes and recycle the packaging waste. |
| B．Put clear labelling on packaging and promote sales. |
| C．Cut packaging waste and improve packaging recycling. |
| D．Follow the packaging design trend and to right things. |
| A．Their labelling on packaging will be simple and generous. |
| B．The majority of their packaging needn’t be recycled. |
| C．They will be of high quality and inexpensive. |
| D．They’ll arrive in the right amount of recyclable packaging. |
