2015개정 영어 비상(홍) 3과 본문

영어 비상홍 3과– Small Actions, Big Impact

 

“Going green” seems to be all the rage these days. Stores and companies use phrases like this to promote their businesses as eco-friendly. It makes sense to try to live in a way that does not harm the environment, but is it easy to go green? In your home, for example, do you always unplug your TV when you aren't watching it? Do stores in your neighborhood always keep their doors shut when the heaters or air conditioners are on? Probably not. Some innovators have taken on the challenge of “going green,” and have come up with some brilliant ideas to make “going green” easier and simpler.

 

Reuse Oldies but goodies!

Everyone has things that are no longer of any use, and chances are, those things will eventually get thrown away. However, some of the things that get thrown out are still useful to other people. Goedzak is a Dutch way of allowing people to get second-hand things that might otherwise be thrown away. It is a special garbage bag that can be filled with used, but still usable items. Placing the bag outside on the pavement makes whatever is in it available to anyone in the community. Goedzak's bright color attracts attention while the transparent side of the bag reveals its contents. People can help themselves to anything they like. What an idea! These transparent garbage containers have helped many Dutch people go greener by reducing the amount of trash going to landfills.

 

Share Talk to the community

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, a third of global food production goes into trash bins annually. In Germany alone, around eleven million tons of food is wasted every year. Having been founded to tackle this problem on a local scale, the online platform, “foodsharing.de” allows extra food in your fridge or cupboard to be distributed to neighbors. The basic concept is simple: people sharing food. The only rule is not to pass anything on to others that you wouldn't eat yourself. This project may change the way people think about food: if food is not shared, it is wasted.

 

Waste Not Drink and eat it!

Using disposable cups may be convenient, but it is not necessarily eco-friendly. They are a massive source of waste. Every year, people in the U.S. use over 100 billion disposable cups, and Koreans dispose of over 15 billion cups each year. That's what drove a few novel designers to come up with edible coffee cups. A cookie forms the main structure, with a white chocolate layer on the inside and a thin layer of sugar paper on the outside. This structure allows you to drink coffee without finding yourself holding a soaked mess. You can think of it as a treat for coffee! You may have to consume extra sugar, but it will definitely create less waste.

 

Use Less Holes mean a lot

What can you do to go green when you have 500 photocopies to make? Many green strategies focus on using less paper, like printing on both sides. Another green strategy is to use less ink, which is what many people already do. But what if you could take it a step further? That's what Ecofont is. A designer thought that if he could create fonts that have tiny holes in them, he might be able to make more efficient use of the amount of ink used. In fact, Ecofont uses about a fifth less ink than traditional fonts without ruining readability. The brilliance of Ecofont is the different perspective it takes on going green: the use of less ink by the font.

 

An eco-friendly way of life is not about changing the entire world overnight. It is about becoming aware of your own wasteful ways and then helping others become aware of theirs. After awareness comes the process of adopting slightly different ways of doing some daily tasks. When you do these things, you are keeping your environmental bank account full. When you go one step further and help others do them too, you are an activist and big changes can happen.

 

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Throwing Away a Fortune

Every year thousands upon thousands of tons of electronics, from air conditioners to smartphones, are thrown out. This adds up to huge amounts of waste which has to be managed, especially for smaller countries like Korea. Is it possible that electronics waste is actually a resource? Like a mine in the ground, many people are beginning to think of electronics waste as "urban mines" because of the amount of gold, silver, copper, plastic, and steel that is waiting to be used again.

 

 

To manufacture electronics products, resources such as gold, silver, copper, glass, plastic, and steel must be mined, purchased, or produced. As resources become harder to get, urban mines may become a more economical solution. About one ton of rock must be dug up in a mine to get around five grams of gold; however, one ton of mobile phones may contain around 300 grams of gold, in addition to other recoverable materials. The potential value of urban mines increases when resources become expensive and waste is not recycled.

 

 

Although electronics waste may be seen from an economic point of view, there is another side to this story: the environmental issue. Recycling electronics waste can lower ecological damage from traditional mines and decrease air pollution from transporting materials over long distances. Moving forward does not always mean making new things; sometimes looking at an old problem from a new perspective is the simplest solution.