Second Life for the Waste In 1993, New York State ordered stores to charge a deposit on beverage(饮料) containers．Within a year, consumers had returned millions.of aluminum cans, glass bottles and plastic, bottles．Plenty of companies were eager to accept the aluminum and glass as raw materials for new products, but because few could figure out.what to do with the plastic, much of it would be buried in landfills (垃圾填埋场)．The problem was not limited to New York．Unfortunately, there'were too few uses for second-hand plastic. Today, one out of five plastic soda bottles is recycled inthe United States．The reason for the change is that now there are dozens of companies across the coun,ry buying disr carded plastic soda bottles and turning them into fence posts, paint brushes, etc. As the New York experience shows, recycling involves more than simply separating valuable materials from the rest of the rubbish．Waste remains v~aste until somebody figures out how to give it a second life and until economic arrangements exist to give that second life value．Without adequate markets to absorb materials collected for recycling,throwaways actually depress prices for used materials. Shrinking landfill space and rising costs for burying: and burning rubbish are forcing local governments to look more closely at recycling．In many areas, especially the East Coast, recycling is already the least expensive waste management option．For every ton of waste recycled, a city avoids paying for its disposal, which, in parts of New York, amounts to savings of more than $100 per ton．Recycling also stimulates the local economy by creating jobs and reduces the pollution c,ontrol and er~ergy costs of industries that make recycled products by giving them a more refined raw material 第 16 题 In 1993, New York had taken a very effective means to deal with the waste.