Reading Text
Environmental campaigners are (1) .......... with governments across the length and (2) .......... of the globe to enact legislation that will (3) .......... the staggering volumes of plastic consumed by modern society — eight million tonnes of which are deposited annually in landfill sites and the world's oceans without ever being recycled. The planet is, quite literally, being poisoned and suffocated by its dominant species.
Certain plastics require thousands of years to (4) .......... . Birds' eggs collected in the Arctic have recently been found to contain plastic microfibres — evidence, (5) .......... , that the material has permeated the food chain of the planet's inhabitants, with no means of predicting the long-term consequences.
(6) .......... intervention at the level of global governance is imperative. Consumers are being discouraged from relying on single-use plastics through fiscal measures such as levies on plastic bags. Yet it is at the industrial level that the appeal of plastic as a cheap and convenient packaging material most urgently needs to be (7) .......... .
(8) .......... a fundamental shift in both attitudes and behaviour, the world is heading inexorably towards an environmental catastrophe — one that, though slow-burning in nature, may prove irreversible.