Question

“We haven’t found anything that we can’t recycle!”

Cigarette ends are everywhere—littering our streets and beaches—and for decades they’ve been thought of as “unrecyclable”. But a New Jerseybased company, called TerraCycle, has taken on the challenge, and has come up with a way to recycle millions of cigarette ends and turn them into industrial plastic products. Its aim is to recycle things that people normally consider impossible to reuse.

Obviously it would be even better for the environment if everyone just stopped smoking, but the statistics show that although there has been an increase in anti-smoking ads and messaging, between 2000 and 2014, global sales of cigarettes increased by 8 percent, and a whole lot of those cigarette ends are ending up as trash. Since most of our litter eventually ends up in waterways, cigarette ends can surely pollute the surrounding environment. “It only takes a single cigarette end to pollute a liter of water,” TerraCycle founder, Tom Szaky, said. “Animals can also mistake littered cigarette ends for food.”

So how do you go about turning all those poisonous ends into something useful? TerraCycle does this by first breaking them down into separate parts. They mix the remaining materials, such as the tobacco and the paper, with other kinds of rubbish, and use it on non-agricultural land, such as golf courses. The filters (过滤嘴) are a little harder. To recycle these, TerraCycle first makes them clean and cuts them into small pieces, and then combines them with other recycled materials, making them into liquid for industrial plastic products.

They’re now also expanding their recycling offerings to the rest of the 80 percent of household waste that currently can’t be recycled, such as chocolate packaging, pens, and mobile phones. The goal is to use the latest research to find a way to stop so much waste ending up in landfill (垃圾填埋), and then get companies to provide money for the process. And so far, it’s working.

“We haven’t found anything that we can’t recycle,” communications director of Terra Cycle, Albe Zakes, said. “But with the amount and variety of packaging and litter in the world, we are always looking for new waste streams to address.”

1.What does Terra Cycle intend to do?

A. Search for recyclable materials for use.

B. Deal with as many cigarette ends as possible.

C. Produce new kinds of industrial plastic products.

D. Recycle what used to be considered unrecyclable.

2.The underlined word “trash” in Paragraph 2 probably means ______.

A. rubbish B. poison

C. disaster D. ruin

3.What does Paragraph 3 mainly talk about?

A. The effective use of cigarette ends.

B. The process of recycling cigarette ends.

C. The difficulty in recycling cigarette ends.

D. The reason for breaking down cigarette ends.

4.What Albe said in the last paragraph implies that ______.

A. there is more and more waste to be recycled

B. it is difficult for TerraCycle to recycle everything

C. TerraCycle is trying to meet the challenge of new waste

D. TerraCycle has successfully recycled a large amount of waste

Answer 1