80 Unit 05 | Caring for our world Topic vocabulary: Plastic and its alternatives/Conservation Add more information from the texts on glass and plastic bottles to the word map. Then improve it with your own ideas. LANGUAGE 33 a Check your summary points of the texts on pp. 77/78 against this key: Text 1: Plastic fantastic! It’s not necessarily true that plastic bottles are worse than glass bottles. Making new glass needs a specific type of sand which is mostly taken from riverbeds and seabeds. Obtaining this can be damaging to the environment as it causes erosion, leading to flooding. Transporting glass for recycling can be environmentally unfriendly as it is heavy, and shipping it adds to emissions. Even if it is put in for recycling, which sometimes people don’t, certain types of glass can’t be recycled, and they take around a million years to decompose. Plastic, on the other hand, is light to transport, easily recyclable into a range of products and also more likely to get recycled. Text 2: Three cheers for glass! Glass bottles are more environmentally friendly than plastic bottles. Making plastic bottles is damaging to the environment due to the amount of oil needed in the production process. Burning this oil produces greenhouse gases, and drilling for it is also environmentally unfriendly. Although it can theoretically be recycled, many single-use plastic bottles get thrown away, and it takes 450 years for them to decompose, or 1,000 years in a landfill site. Plastic loses material value when it is recycled, which is why it is downcycled to produce other material, not new plastic bottles. Glass is 100% recyclable and doesn’t lose material value. It can be recycled over and over and is used to produce new bottles. made from oil … lightweight … easily reusable … plastic and its alternatives … … plastic (+) plastic (–) glass (+) glass (–) other options Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv
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