For each paragraph, choose the most suitable heading from the list which follows. There is one extra heading which you do not need to use.
GARBAGE
A. Getting rid of waste is a huge problem.
B. Garbage no longer just dumped.
C. Smell unbearable.
D. New regulations introduced.
E. New wrapping materials.
F. Man makes rubbish.
G. Difficulties for the householder.
H. Many examples of problems caused by waste.
1
Universally, to be human is to be a garbage-dispenser, and summer is the season of stink. The garbage champion of the world is the United States which holds the lead by a narrow margin over Australia. Americans have a garbage pile of 750 kilo for every man, woman and child in the country against 730 kilo for Australian. The waste dumped by the average German or Japanese is about one half of that amount.
2
Between 1960 and 1985, the amount of American rubbish dumped every year almost doubled, and it is still on the increase. People in New York produce almost twice as much waste per person as Parisians, and in California they produce enough to fill the Dodgers’ baseball stadium every nine days - it’s a big stadium. About 80 per cent of American garbage lies buried under thin layers of earth at landfill sites. Many of these have now been filled, and closed, in the past ten years.
3
Various scandals have made Americans aware of their garbage problem, and the dangers inherent in it. By and large, the average American has a low tolerance for dirt. He doesn’t like it. In 1987, there was the saga of the Long Island garbage barge which sailed to Belize and back seeking desperately a dumping ground for its odiferous cargo: eventually the 3,000 tons of solid waste ended up in a Brooklyn incinerator. In the summer of 1989, medical waste - needles, syringes and plastics started turning up on beaches up and down the east coast. In addition there have been the estimates that 100,000 sea mammals and countless fish die each year around American shores because of internal damage caused by swallowing plastic. Such scandals have given rise to organisations such as CRAP - Citizens Reacting against Pollution. CRAP fights against the opening of new landfills.
4
What does one do about all this garbage? Americans have come to take it very seriously indeed. Municipalities now have garbage police with the power to impose $500 fines on offenders. There has been a rubbish revolution. Americans spend a lot of time testing cans with magnets to see if they contain iron, and ripping the wax paper out of cereal packets.
5
In most American states it is now the law to separate your waste: for example, as far as bottles are concerned, you must separate the coloured from the clear, and the brown from the green. The New York Times ran a front page story about a working class family, the Wilkersons of Woodbury, New Jersey.The Wilkersons must separate their waste into 11 separate containers. As The Times observed, putting out the trash is not as easy as it used to be. The Wilkersons have seven rubbish bags outside their home, and not an item, not a paper towel, is discarded without thinking which bin to put it in.
6
The biggest recent item of change has been to biodegradable plastics. Increasingly, plastic food packaging is banned, unless it is degradable. The old polyethelene containers might survive 400 years or more. The new degradable ones begin to crumble after only three to four weeks exposure to sunlight: although sunlight is usually in short supply on garbage dumps and landfills. The latest idea is to make plastics with added cornstarch that will be eaten by bacteria. In theory, the plastic disintegrates into pieces small enough to be eaten by micro-organisms.
7
In the bad old days, before the clean air acts of the early sixties, most garbage was incinerated or burnt in open dumps. Now, however, most of it is used to recover energy or is recycled. For the USA, such a change in attitude is an achievement, although the problem of creating garbage, as opposed to its disposal, remains.
