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03 Environmental Science

Now listen to a lecture related to the topic in step 1. Fill in the blanks of the note diagram below with keywords or key phrases used in the lecture.

M: In many countries, stores have been encouraging people to bring their own reusable bags to carry groceries for years now.

However, this idea of reusable shopping bags is just becoming popular in other countries, and I’m really glad they’re finally getting around to pushing for this because, actually, there are a whole lot of benefits that will occur if we get rid of plastic grocery bags.

First, there’s the huge issue of waste − I mean, think about the plastic grocery bags that the store gives you.

How many people save those? At my house, we have a lot of them collected, so any more that we get end up getting… we just throw the extra bags out.

And you know where all of that ends up… that’s right, it goes straight into landfills.

Also, a lot of bags don’t even make it into landfills – instead, they end up littering the environment.

This makes it easy for animals to get caught up in the bags. Also, the bags take several years to decompose… sometimes, it could take up to 1,000 years.

It’s just not a good situation. Plastic bags are a huge source of waste and, well, they are not necessary.

Besides environmental benefits, there’re also the financial considerations that we have to factor in when we talk about getting rid of plastic bags.

Now, granted, plastic bags only cost one cent − that’s not much at all.

However, that can add up significantly when you’re talking about a busy grocery store that serves thousands of people in a day.

Considering that every person uses three or four bags, you’re looking at a noticeable bunch of money at the end of the day, right?

If we started to discard plastic bags and adopt reusable bags, then there’s a good chance that the cost of groceries would go down a little bit, since grocery stores will no longer have to pay for thousands of bags each week.

Finally, we would save a lot more petroleum and natural gas if we got rid of plastic grocery bags.

You might not know this, but each year it’s estimated that 380 billion plastic bags cost the world 1.6 billion gallons of petroleum.

So basically, we’re using our precious nonrenewable resources to create bags that many people only use once or twice before throwing them away.

In contrast, renewable bags will save us billions of dollars in natural gas and petroleum, allowing us to use the money and these resources for more worthwhile purposes.

So really, there are many good reasons to discontinue the use of plastic grocery bags. It would significantly benefit the entire world in environmental and financial ways.