IELTS Reading Matching Features Example 1

Is it time to halt the rising tide of plastic packaging?

A. Concern over plastic packaging has produced a squall of conflicting initiatives from retailers, manufacturers, and local authorities. It’s a squall that dies down and then blows harder from one month to the next. ‘It is being left to the individual conscience and supermarkets playing the market,’ says Tim Lang, a professor specializing in food polio’. ‘It’s a mess.’ Dick Scarle of the Packaging Federation points out that societies without sophisticated packaging lose all their food before it reaches consumers and that in the UK, waste in supply chains is about 3 per cent. In India, it is more than 50 per cent. The difference comes later: the British throw out 30 percent of the food they buy – an environmental cost in terms of emissions equivalent to a fifth of the cars on their roads. Packagers agree that cardboard, metals, and glass all have their good points, but there’s nothing quite like plastic. With more than 20 families of polymers to choose from and then sometimes blend, packaging designers and manufacturers have a limitless variety of qualities to play with.

B. One store commissioned a study to find precise data on which had a less environmental impact: selling apples loose or ready-wrapped. Helene Roberts, head of packaging, explains that in fact, they found apples in fours on a tray covered by plastic film needed 27 per cent less packaging in transportation than those sold loose. Steve Kelsey, a packaging designer, finds die debate frustrating. He argues that the hunger to do something quickly is diverting effort away from more complicated questions about how you truly alter supply chains. Rather than further reducing the weight of a plastic bottle, more thought should be given to how packaging can be recycled.

1. C
2. A
3. B
4. D