Word: plastics
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...floor is made of plywood panels, and the ceiling is the blue Arizona sky. DANCE AT YOUR OWN RISK reads the sign posted near a huge cactus. Couples dance in the desert, romance hovering like heat haze; some dress in matching colors. Stuck in the ground around them are plastic hyacinths, windmills, ducks. "I can't help it if I'm still in love with you," sings a man to himself, staring off at the mountains...
That line from Mike Nichols' 1967 film, The Graduate, became a classic put- down of the Establishment, but 22 years later plastics are no joke. Mounds of plastic-foam cups and empty soda bottles clutter roadsides and choke waterways. Though the U.S. faces a staggering excess of all forms of solid waste, plastic refuse is especially onerous: all but invulnerable to deterioration, the debris can last for centuries. What's more, a mere 1% of all plastic waste is being recycled, in contrast to 25% of used aluminum...
...Helsinki accord calls on industrialized countries to create a U.N. fund that would help the developing world adapt to life without CFCs, which are used, among other things, as refrigerator coolants and blowing agents for making plastic foam. Just how this would be done was not specified. Still, Norway's Environment Minister Sissel Ronbeck announced that her country would contribute 0.1% of its gross national product, or about $88 million, if others would do the same...
...protected at all," he says. "We need to take away all mechanical activity for at least two to three miles around them." Tawfik proposes eventually planting trees around all outdoor monuments to protect them from winds as well as to absorb moisture. Within monuments, he wants to install clear plastic shields to prevent tourists from touching paintings and inscriptions and air-cleaning systems to remove moisture and dust...
...reporters following along, the thermodynamic duo marched onto Capitol Hill to tell Congress how their simple tabletop experiment had generated fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the sun. Displaying slides filled with complex equations, wielding electronic pointers and pulling a mockup of their apparatus from a plastic shopping bag, the bespectacled researchers mesmerized the members of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology with an account of how their device produced more energy, in the form of heat, than it consumed. The politicians may have been baffled by the chemistry, but they had no trouble grasping the implications...