2007年VOA标准英语-Environmentalists in US Target Plastic Bags

时间：2007-08-11 03:24:35

搜索关注在线英语听力室公众号：tingroom，领取免费英语资料大礼包。

（单词翻译）

By Ted¹ Landphair
Washington
09 August 2007

Every day, American consumers are offered a simple choice when they are by a store's cashier: "paper or plastic?" But as VOA's Ted Landphair explains in today's searching for solutions report, some communities are starting to take away that option.

San Francisco, California, has ordered big grocery and drugstore chains to stop passing out the strong, sheer plastic bags, made from petrochemicals.

And the city council in Maryland's quaint² capital plans to vote on an even stronger measure come October.

Sam Shropshire

Alderman Sam Shropshire introduced it. "We're talking about 100 billion plastic checkout³ bags distributed annually⁴ in the United States by retailers⁵. And greater than 95 percent, according to the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, are going in landfills, or they're blowing around in the air. Or washing into storm drains, making it into our creeks⁶ and rivers, and out into the Chesapeake Bay."

There, fish and waterfowl sometimes mistake the bags for jellyfish.

Plastics are harmful to fish and waterfowl

Shropshire's measure would force even small Annapolis shopkeepers to switch entirely⁷ to 100 percent recycled shopping bags that guarantee that no trees have been cut.

Grocery store clerk: "Hi. Would you like paper or plastic?"
Tousaan Jones, customer: "Plastic."

These days, nine out of 10 American shoppers prefer plastic over paper.

San Francisco concluded that plastic bags take hundreds of years to degrade in a landfill. But in the here and now, Tousaan Jones likes how they stretch, are easy to carry, and do not fall apart in the rain. "I think that the older people prefer to use the paper bags, because it was what they were used to."

Older people, like Seymour Alloy⁸. "To me, it's an absolute. A store that doesn't give the option of paper bags is not a store that I would go to, except in extremism."

Barry Scher is a vice⁹ president of the big Giant Foods grocery chain.

Barry Scher

Scher says it would cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars to give up plastic bags. Consider, he says, how much truck and storage space paper bags take up. "Plastic bags is [are] about that high [reaches to eye level]. We did that demonstration¹⁰ before the city council in Annapolis. And a thousand paper bags is [are] about that high [reaches far over his head]."

On one thing, grocer Scher and Alderman Shropshire agree: The ideal choice would be re-usable totes like shoppers around the world take back and forth¹¹ to market.

So, there's a lot more at stake than the simple question of "paper or plastic."

分享到：

本文本内容来源于互联网抓取和网友提交，仅供参考，部分栏目没有内容，如果您有更合适的内容，欢迎点击提交分享给大家。

2007年VOA标准英语-Environmentalists in US Target Plastic Bags

Error Warning!