The features that have made plastic so important in the global market are the same ones that make it such a pervasive pollutant: durability and resistance to degradation.
Interpretation
Plastic's durability has made it a valuable material but has also led to significant pollution issues.
The quote emphasizes the paradox of plastic as both a highly useful material and a major environmental problem. While its durability and resistance to degradation contribute to its widespread use in countless applications, these same qualities cause substantial harm to ecosystems as plastic waste accumulates over time, leading to serious ecological and health issues.
In practice
This quote can be used in a public speech about environmental sustainability.
As climate change moves from a model of the future to the reality of the present, health care systems across the country are facing a difficult set of questions. What are doctors supposed to do when wildfires, rising floodwater or other natural disasters threaten their ability to provide care for patients?
When policymakers, financiers and scientists describe the world decades from now, in the throes of climatic changes that we now only model, they emphasize what might be lost.
A less icy Arctic is coming, and generally speaking, that's not a good thing. Climate change is warming this region twice as fast as the global average, threatening wildlife and indigenous communities.
Take one round-trip flight between New York and California, and you've generated about 20 percent of the greenhouse gases that your car emits over an entire year.
The fact that communities that are relatively powerless often are exposed to more dangerous pollution and the worst effects of climate change: a society like that is one that is less free and less equal for everybody.
Now, as the world's largest economy and as the world's second largest emitter, America bears our responsibility to address climate change, and we intend to meet that responsibility.
For the record, I am sticking with my claim that the simultaneous degradation of air quality, water quality, water supply, food safety, soil quality, and other environment-related variables is the main challenge to China's continued development.
Government-mandated and -subsidized ethanol from corn will go down in history as the "Iraq War" of environmental solutions: ill-considered, costly, and disastrous.
We do not have to choose between a healthy environment and a healthy economy.
I think history shows that countries have to have some kind of a threshold level of economic success before they begin to have the means and the will to focus on the environment.
When we speak of maintaining clean water supplies and a sustainable use of the environment, we should also stress the elimination of harmful chemicals in consumer products.
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