A. Throwaway living took off in the second half of the 20th century.

Disposable coffee
cups, plastic stirrers, and plates that could be tossed in the bin 'improved' our lives.
Global plastic production soared from 1.5 million tonnes in 1950 to nearly 200 million
tonnes in 2002. Today, it's reached the 300 million tonne mark. Reports of ocean garbage
patches suggest that much of that plastic eventually ends up in our seas. Take a boat out
far enough and you'll witness bottles, toy figurines, roller balls from underarm deodorants
and thousands of plastic sandals all floating around in the sea. A project called The Ocean
Cleanup has been testing floating platforms for collecting bigger bits of plastic, but they
cannot deal with microplastics. Microplastics is the technical term for tiny pieces of
plastic. They are so finely shredded by ocean currents that they're impossible to spot from
a boat and are easily mistaken for food by sea creatures.
B. A recent study by Marcus Eriksen, one of the co-founders of 5 Gyres, the organisation
that studies plastic pollution in the seas, suggests that at least five trillion pieces of
plastic, altogether weighing in at over 268,000 tonnes, are floating around near the
surface of the sea. An incredible 92 per cent of the pieces are microplastics. According to
Eriksen, we'll have to live with what's already out there. "It's going to sink, it's going to
get buried, it's going to fossilize," he says. "There's no efficient means to clean up 5km
down on the ocean floor." No one really knows what damage all that stranded
microplastic is doing, but the hope is that once it's mixed up with the sediment, it's doing
less of it. Yet the clouds of microplastics swirling in the water column pose a problem.
The debris is easy for marine life to swallow, but the gunk that the plastics collect - such
as pollution and bacteria - are also a threat.
C. In May 2014, chemist Alexandra Ter Halle joined the Seventh Continent Expedition to
the north Atlantic Ocean with the aim of analysing the gunk. She collected samples and is
now analysing her data back at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France, to work out
why some plastics attract pollution as they age. "The difficulty lies in the fact that there
are so many plastics, of different colours, shapes and compositions," she says. "It's
difficult to extract a trend from all those pieces." Ter Halle believes the answer is
prevention. She says that switching to biodegradable plastics could offer part of that
solution. While the first generation of biodegradables just broke down into smaller
pieces, the second generation may have some utility. Ter Halle suggests that they could,
for instance, be handy for shopping bags.
D. Yet Prof Richard Thompson, a marine biologist at Plymouth University, believes that
the very notion of biodegradable plastic is flawed. "The idea that you could build into a
plastic a feature that would enable it to fulfil its life in service without deteriorating and
then, the minute it becomes an item of litter, it somehow rapidly and harmlessly
degrades... it kind of seems like you're aspiring towards the impossible," he says. He
recently attended a workshop in Portugal involving over 50 people from around Europe,
including scientists, policymakers and industry types eager to offer ideas for solving the
problem. But there was a shortage of cutting-edge solutions. "From my perspective, there
was nothing new from any of the participants," he says. "A range of solutions are known
to us, but it's more about translating that into action."
E. To dramatically reduce the amount of plastic accumulating in the oceans, the 'loop' of
producing and recycling plastics would have to become a closed one. This means that any
material leaving the system as waste would enter it again as a renewable resource. One
option is banning certain types of plastics for particular applications, such as the plastic
microbeads used in facial scrubs and toothpastes. These tiny particles - often measuring
less than Imm - wash straight down the sink and are too small to be filtered out at the
waterworks. All plastic products would need to be designed with an end-of-life care
package. In short, solving the plastic problem in the oceans means solving plastic
pollution, full stop.
Which section mentions the following?
31. The importance of responsible product design
32. Potential improvement of an innovation
33. Contemporary lifestyles eventuating undesirable consequences
34. A popularly held solution to plastic contamination being rejected
35. A lack of new and advanced ideas about dealing with pollution problems
36. Uncertainty about the extent of the harm caused to ocean ecosystems
37. Plastic pollution impinging on aesthetic values
38. The necessity of putting ideas into practice
39. A consequence of plastic pollution that will remain
40. Scientific study of pollution hampered by the variety of plastic