Waste management is an industry. Many forms of waste can develop into a major problem when they are not handled properly. 【小题1】

Humans generate （生产）a great deal of waste as a byproduct of their existence. Every task, from preparing a meal to producing a car, is accompanied with the production of waste materials. Waste management agencies have placed an increasing focus on reducing waste so that there is less waste to cope with. 【小题2】 Good examples include developing more efficient processes and reducing packaging. And individual consumers can also make a contribution by trying and making less waste. A big part of this movement has focused on recycling, in which usable goods are reused.

Transportation of waste is a major issue. The reason is that appropriate disposal sites may be remote.

【小题3】 Subscription pickup services are available, with people paying a flat fee to have their waste picked up and disposed of, and people can also subscribe to special services, like medical waste pickup services.

【小题4】 Historically, the approach to a great deal of waste is burying it in landfills. This option has become increasingly problematic due to issues like limited space, pollution, and the concern that usable materials may be buried in landfills. Waste has also been burned, in some cases being used to generate electric power. Some other approaches to waste management have included simply dumping it into the sea or shooting it out into space without any attempt at containment. 【小题5】 Rather than effectively deal with waste problems, they bring waste management problems to future generations.

Last fall, the Great Salt Lake hit its lowest level since record keeping began. The lake sank to nearly six meters below the long-term average. The lake’s shrinking threatens to upend the ecosystem, disturbing the migration and survival of 10 million birds, including ducks and geese.

Duck hunters aren’t the only ones worried about the Great Salt Lake. The decades-long decline in lake level is raising alarm bells for millions of people who live in the region. The low lake level and increasing salts in the lake water threaten to destroy economic mainstays like agriculture, tourism and mining. Exposed salts can also reduce air quality and so threaten public health.

Saline lakes (咸水湖) are terminal lakes. They have no rivers flowing out of them. As water disappears, salts are left behind. At the same time, the people who live in these deserts use freshwater for crops, homes and industry. Residents get water from streams and rivers into canals, pipelines or reservoirs before it reaches the lakes. And as the lakes shrink, the salt in water increases.

Lake Poopo, a highland lake in Bolivia that used to stretch 90 kilometers long and 32 kilometers wide, is now a salty mud flat. The Aral Sea shared by Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, once the world’s fourth largest lake, has at times in recent decades shrunk to a tenth of its historic 68,000-square-kilometer surface area. Some saline lakes, like Nevada’s Winnemucca Lake, dried up so long ago — the waters that fed it were led to agricultural fields — that most people have forgotten they were ever wet.

The good news is that people still have time to halt the Great Salt Lake’s decline by using less water. Cutting agricultural and other outdoor water use by a third to half through a combination of voluntary conservation measures and policy changes would allow the lake to refill enough to support the region’s economy, ecology and quality of life. If this succeeds, the Great Salt Lake can be a model for how to save other saline lakes around the world.