2017年浙江（11月） Passage C

There are energy savings to be made from all recyclable materials, sometimes huge savings. Recycling plastics and aluminum, for instance, uses only 5% to 10% as much energy as producing new plastic or smelting (提炼)aluminum.

Long before most of us even noticed what we now call “the environment,” Buckminster Fuller said, “Pollution is nothing but the resources(资源)we are not harvesting. We allow them to be left around because we’ve been ignorant of their value.” To take one example, let’s compare the throwaway economy(经济)with a recycling economy as we feed a cat for life.

Say your cat weight 5kg and eats one can of food each day. Each empty can of its food weighs 40g. In a throwaway economy, you would throw away 5,475 cans over the car’s 15-year lifetime. That’s 219kg of steel-more tan a fifth of a ton and more than 40 times the cat’s weight.

In a recycling economy, we would make one set of 100 cans to start with, then replace them over and over again with recycled cans. Since almost 3% of the metal is lost during reprocessing, we’d have to make an extra 10 cans each year. But in all, only 150 cans will be used up over the cat’s lifetime-and we’ll still have 100 left over for the next cat.

Instead of using up 219kg of steel, we’ve use only 6kg. And because the process of recycling steel is less polluting than making new steel, we’ve also achieved the following significant savings; in energy use—47% to 74%; in air pollution—85%; in water pollution—35%; in water use—40%.