Callum:  Hello and [bad word] to Talk about English, I’m Callum Robertson. 
 
William: And I’m William Kremer. 
 
Callum: [bad word] up in the programme, we’re continuing our topic of the environment. 
 
William:  We look at the subject of recycling 
 
Gareth Lloyd  
We’ve actually worked out that the current recycling in the UK is the same as taking 3.5 
million cars off the road so it is well worth doing. 
 
Callum:  And we talk to a listener about the environment and his favourite English 
expression 
 
Anil Kumar 
Hello, my name is Anil, I’m from India. Best things in life are free. This is a saying which I 
like very much. 
 
William:  All that and more in today’s Talk about English. 
 
 
Callum:  So William, this is the first time we’ve done the programme together, are you 
feeling up to it? Ready to go?  
 
William:  (Responds) 
 
Callum:  We’ve been concentrating on the topic of the environment over the last few 
weeks; 
 
William: Yes, it’s one of those subjects that’s in the news a lot. Every week there seems 
to be new stories of the damage that humans seem to be doing to the planet. 
 
Callum:  But what, as individuals can we do about it? We’ll find out in a little while. 
Before that though it’s time for the first of today’s Word Facts. 
 
WORD FACTS 1 
WORD FACTS 
Today’s word is green 
– R – DOUBLE - N 
Green has five letters but only four sounds and just one syllable - green. 
Green is a colour, the colour of grass and leaves on trees.  
It can be an adjective or a noun and it appears in a number of metaphorical, idiomatic and 
other expressions 
WORD FACTS / AND THAT’S FACT 
 
William: So green is our word of the day and there’ll be more word facts throughout the 
programme. 
 
Callum:  Our main topic today is recycling. It’s something that now in Britain most 
people do to a certain degree. But William, what do we mean by recycling? 
 
William:  It’s to do with [bad word]  Our waste. If we throw it away it goes into a big 
hole in the ground, called a land-fill. But some things can be used again. 
Bottles for example can be washed and reused or made into new bottles. This is 
recycling, using something again, not throwing it away.  
 
Callum:  I certainly remember as a child taking bottles back to the shop and getting 
money, but it seems only fairly recently that we’ve really started recycling 
seriously in this country, bottles metal, paper, plastics. Anyway, our guest 
today can tell us more about the subject. Unfortunately he isn’t able to join us 
in the studio but I was able to speak to him on the phone earlier this morning. 
His name’s Gareth Lloyd and he’s director [bad word] at the 
environmental organisation WRAP – the Waste Resources Action Programme. 
I asked him first what the purpose or WRAP is. 
 
Gareth Lloyd   
Well the purpose of the organisation is to develop campaigns to make us more resource 
efficient and what that really means is to boost the amount of recycling in the country but also 
to look at new ways of minimising our waste so we don’t even need to recycle it in the first 
place. 
 
I remember when I was a child taking bottles but I wonder, when did recycling really begin to 
take off and [bad word] a priority in this country? 
 
I think it probably goes back ten or fifteen years when we started to have a lot more bottle 
banks in the country but our rate of recycling was still six, eight percent and probably in the 
last ten years it’s really started to move along and what is very noticeable is there’s been a 
steep increase in the last three years, the rate of recycling has nearly doubled and it’s now up 
to 27% of household waste 
 
It may seem like a silly question or a basic question but why is it necessary to recycle?  
 
No, well, that’s a very good question. You do two good things or three good things for the 
environment. It reduces the amount [bad word] we send to landfill sites and certainly in the 
UK we’re [bad word] out of space in landfill sites, that’s big holes in the ground, which 
we used to have lot of but we don’t have so many of now. It also helps conserve energy 
because if you reuse those materials, for example glass, you can save a lot of energy rather 
than using new raw materials and it’s actually a positive way that all of us can make a positive 
contribution to tackling climate change. We’ve actually worked out that the current recycling 
in the UK is the same as taking 3.5 million cars off the road so it is well worth doing. 
  [bad word] from Callum and Will 
 
Callum:  It’s Word Facts time 
 
WORD FACTS 2 
WORD FACTS 
As an adjective the word “green” is used to describe the environment in general such as areas 
which have a lot of green plants and trees 
“I like the English countryside, it’s very green” 
“London is a very green city, there are lots of parks” 
It’s also used to talk about things that help and protect the environment. 
“Amsterdam is a very green city, there are bicycles everywhere and the dutch are very keen 
on recycling” 
“These days [bad word] are looking to develop green forms of energy, such as solar 
power and wind power” 
As a noun, ‘a Green’ is someone who belongs to the political party, the Green party. 
It’s also a large area of grass at the centre of a village where people can walk, sit and play 
games. 
“When I was a child I remember playing on the village green outside my grandparents’ house, 
it’s a car park now.”  
 
And ‘greens’ are the vegetables you have to eat 
“My mum always told me that I couldn’t have any ice-cream until I had finished my greens!”  
WORD FACTS / AND THAT’S FACT 
 
Callum:  As we heard in the word facts ‘green’ is a word frequently associated with 
environmental issues. I suppose because it’s one the main colours in nature, 
particularly in countries with a lot of rain, like Britain. But is Britain a 
particularly green country, I asked Gareth Lloyd from WRAP about the habits 
of the British, how much waste do we produce and how much do we recycle 
 
Gareth Lloyd 
We think that is about roughly about a metric tonne of waste generated per average household 
 
And how much of that are we recycling at the moment? 
 
Well the good news is we’ve had a steep increase in the last three years. It used to be 14% of 
that would be recycled, it’s now 27% so it’s nearly doubled. So that’s 27% of that which is 
recycled so it goes back into something else, it’s transformed into another bottle another can 
and it all takes it away from landfill so there’s agood environmental benefit there. 
 
And what’s the, do you think, the biggest challenge for recycling? 
 
Well I actually think we need to boost the rate of recycling but also think much more about 
what we can do in terms of waste minimisation so we need to start looking hard, I know the 
supermarkets are starting to do this at how to actually reduce excess packaging, how to get 
those reusable bags used much more, how to use technology to actually help us get the 
products that we need in the minimum packaging. But it’s worth saying the actually we’re all 
asking questions in this country more and more about our waste. I mean it was one of those 
things that we probably didn’t want to think about. Somebody would take it away for us and 
get rid of it and we didn’t want to think of it. The reality is that we do need to think about it,  
 
it’s part of looking after our environment. Recycling makes a strong contribution to tackling 
climate change and I think that many of us as shoppers are asking questions about whether we 
should be taking all those plastic bags. Currently I think the estimate is in the UK we use 15 
billion plastic bags and so everyone is doing their bit when they take in a reusable bag and use 
it and use it and use it again because it’s taking all of that material away from landfill.    
  [bad word] from Callum 
 
Callum:  This is Talk about English from BBC Learning English [bad word]  Still [bad word] 
our international caller and details of our [bad word]  
 
William:  But now, here are some more word facts 
 
WORD FACTS 3 
WORD FACTS 
Green is used in a number of idiomatic expressions. Someone who is good at gardening is 
said to have ‘green-fingers’ and be ‘green-fingered’ 
“I’m hopeless in the garden, everything I touch dies, but my mum’s very green-fingered, she 
grows all her own vegetables” 
Green is also the colour of envy: 
“When my brother got a new car I was green with envy” 
And jealousy is described as the ‘green-eyed monster.’ 
Green is also the colour of inexperience. 
“He’s still a bit green, he needs some more experience before he can meet the really important 
clients.” 
Green is also the colour used to describe someone who is not looking very well, for example 
someone suffering from sea sickness. 
“You look green, is eve