以下のエッセイを読んで、文末にあるComposition Topic（作文テーマ）で
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【ロジャー・ノースリッジ先生】 英国オックスフォード大学卒業 |
現在、長野在住。山の家の改造がライフワーク。
PLASTIC
It is difficult for us to imagine that there was a time, just three generations ago, when virtually nothing was made of plastic. Today, it is all around us. Being soft and easily molded, it is the ultimate convenience material. Most consumer items are now at least partially made of plastic, and a great deal of what we eat and drink comes wrapped in it. A million plastic bottles are used and discarded every minute, and nearly all the plastic used for food containers and packaging is single-use plastic. So what happens to it after it is thrown away?
About half of all plastic PET bottles are collected for recycling, but in practice only about 7% of those collected are made into new bottles. The remainder are either buried in landfill sites or washed into the ocean, where they do not just disappear. Plastic takes hundreds of years to break down. In other words, nearly all the plastic that has ever been manufactured, equivalent in weight to one billion elephants, still exists somewhere in the world. 10 million tonnes of it finds its way into the sea every year. By 2050, there will be more plastic in the world’s oceans than fish. Our precious sea is becoming a chemical soup, full of small fragments of plastic, which are eaten by seabirds, fish and many other creatures. Since the plastic cannot be digested, it accumulates in their bodies and eventually kills them.
If we really cared about the future of our planet, we would not allow this to happen. The consequences of dumping all this unnatural material into the environment will be catastrophic, and yet the solutions are very simple. Plastic bags could be outlawed, as in some countries, or at least customers could be made to pay for them. In the UK, when supermarket customers started to be charged the equivalent of 7.5 yen for bags, their use fell immediately by 80%. Again, we could probably make all plastic packaging materials biodegradable. And many plastic items, such as the 500 million plastic straws that are used in the United States every day, could easily be made of safer materials like paper. Urgent action needs to be taken, or the convenience of our modern lifestyle could end up costing us the earth.
COMPOSITION TOPICS
1.
In your opinion, what actions should the Japanese government take to solve the problem of plastic pollution?
2.
Give some examples of plastic items that you use in your everyday life. Which of them do you think are really necessary, and which of them could be made from materials other than plastic?
QUESTIONS （内容理解にご利用ください）
1. What is one of the main uses of plastic?
2. Where does most of the plastic we use end up?
3. What happens to sea creatures when they eat plastic?
4. Does the writer think it is difficult to solve the problem of plastic pollution?
5. What will happen if we don’t take action?
