Recycling isn’t anything new. Waste paper, rings, and many other things have been recycled and used again in many different ways for many years. It is only the word that is new. But now that natural materials are becoming more difficult to find, many countries are experimenting with other ways of keeping materials.

In the USA, a publishing firm has brought out several books on pollution and waste in the United States. The books are made of recycled paper梩hat is paper that has been used as paper before. In this way, several thousand trees are saved. Multiply those books by hundred, or even a thousand, and the whole forests are saved. One clever schoolboy has worked it out that if every schoolbook in the USA was recycled, there would be enough paper for fifty packets of peanuts (花生) for every child in the world for five years. He doesn’t say where the peanuts are to come from.

Several firms are experimenting with making containers (集装箱) from a hard plastic which, when the containers are finished, can be used as building materials, a kind of brick. If mountains of empty cans all over the world can be changed into building materials that are not too expensive, that too, is a new source (来源) of material.

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