Pronunciation ChallengeCNN10: California Coast Oil Leak / Recycling E-waste

Day 5

[Transcript]

-California Coast Oil Leak-

A leak in an oil pipeline has shut down beaches, threatened wildlife, and triggered a large cleanup effort about five miles off the coast of southern California. The faulty pipe is 17 miles long; it belongs to a company called Amplify Energy. The CEO of the company claims that their employees were working at sea when they noticed a sheen in the water. Coast guards were soon contacted and they cleared out oil at both ends of the pipeline to try to keep additional crude from leaking. While officials say it looks like the leak has stopped, it still causes 3,000 barrels, a total of 126,000 gallons of oil to spill into the sea.

Local officials say natural wetland habitats in the area have been damaged and dead animals have washed up onshore. US government agencies are investigating the spill and helping with the cleanup, but what's still a mystery is how exactly this happened and where exactly the breach of the pipeline occurred.

-Recycling E-waste-

E-waste, or electronics waste, has been a major problem since 3C products such as phones, computers and other appliances have dominated our daily lives. What can be done with e-wastes? That’s right, we recycle them and turn them into something useful. All of the unwanted or broken microwave machines, printers, cables, and laptops are chopped up, and all sorts of new materials are picked out from the remains to be used in manufacturing once more.

According to statistics, we each produce an average of 7 kilograms of electronic waste per year. That's the equivalent to almost 4 laptops per person on the planet every year and is expected to double by 2050. Getting rid of all this stuff is not an easy job, and throwing e-waste to landfills is certainly not a solution but just idling for our future generations. Enviroserve, a company that collects e-waste from more than 10 countries across the Middle East and Africa is determined to provide an alternative solution. For now, the company is currently operating at only 7% capacity, but eventually, they hope to process 39,000 tons of e-waste every year.

For Enviroserve, there’s still a big opportunity out there. Around the world, less than 20% of electronic waste is properly recycled, and currently, only 10 billion US dollar worth of the raw materials are being recovered from e-waste, and nearly 50 billion are not recovered at all. Electronic waste, an example of how one man's trash can actually become another man's treasure.


[Sentence of the day]

A leak in an oil pipeline has shut down beaches, threatened wildlife, and triggered a large cleanup effort.

[Vocabulary words]

1. threaten
to tell someone that you will kill or hurt them or cause problems if they do not do what you want

Ex: The robbers threatened the shopkeeper with a gun.

2. trigger
(n) the part of a gun where you press to fire
(v) to cause something to start

Ex: If you pull the trigger, you won’t know where the treasure is hidden.

Ex: Some people find that certain foods trigger their headaches.

3. effort
physical or mental activity needed to achieve something

Ex: It takes a long time to prepare the dish but the results are so good that it's worth the effort.



Alright, that’s all we have time for today.
Folks, what do you do with your old cell phones?
Do you recycle them or do you still use them sometimes?
Share with me in the comment section down below.
This is Ken Miao and I’ll see you guys again next time.

"A leak in an oil pipeline has shut down beaches, threatened wildlife, and triggered a large cleanup effort."