1 Read the text about drinks cans. Choose the correct summary.
a How you can become a millionaire selling drinks
in cans.
b How recycling cans is better for the environment
How we can help the environment by not buying
drinks in cans
WHAT CAN
WE DO?
475 billion cans of drink are sold in the
world every year. What happens to all
these empty aluminium cans?
Amazingly, a lot of them are recycled!
It takes 100 years for an aluminium can
to decompose in a landfill. So recycling
makes sense.
Aluminium doesn't occur naturally. It's made from bauxite
in a process called smelting. Producing aluminium is
energy-intensive. Bauxite is extracted by mining, which is
expensive and creates environmental problems. Bauxite
mining harms forests, which affects plants and animals,
and the chemicals which are used in the process affect the
health of people living there.
Recycling reduces the need to mine bauxite. Recycling
aluminium consumes only 5% of the energy needed to
produce it by mining and smelting. In fact, making one can
with recycled aluminium saves enough energy to run a
television for three hours!
Aluminium is one of the most common materials in
modern life. It's the cheapest material to recycle, and can
be recycled indefinitely because it isn't damaged by the
process. Cans are also one of the easiest things to recycle
- new drinks cans appear in the shops only six weeks after
recycling!
In some countries people pay extra for each can they buy.
If they recycle the can or take it back to a shop, they get
this money back. Many places have got special machines
where cans are crushed, and you get a ticket saying how
many cans you recycled so you can reclaim the money
In Sweden, where this is very successful, 92% of cans are
recycled. In Britain, people sell empty cans for charity
There are several hundred places that buy cans and then
recycle them. Just imagine - if every can in the UK were
recycled like this, it would raise over £30 million a year for
good causes!
