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In 2001, a group of Japanese scientists made a startling discovery at a rubbish dump.
2001年，日本的一群科学家在一个垃圾场有了惊人的发现。
In trenches packed with dirt and waste, they found a slimy film of bacteria that had been happily chewing through plastic bottles, toys and other bric-a-brac.
在满是泥土和垃圾的沟渠里，他们发现一层黏糊糊的细菌正在乐滋滋地啃食着塑料瓶、玩具和其他小东西。
As they broke down the trash, the bacteria harvested the carbon in the plastic for energy, which they used to grow, move and divide into even more plastic-hungry bacteria.
当细菌分解这些垃圾时，它们会吸收塑料中的碳作为能量，用于生长、移动和分裂出更多啃食塑料的细菌。
Even if not in quite the hand-to-mouth-to-stomach way we normally understand it, the bacteria were eating the plastic.
这虽然不是我们通常理解的从手到嘴到胃的进食方式，但细菌也是在吃塑料。
The scientists were led by Kohei Oda, a professor at the Kyoto Institute of Technology. His team was looking for substances that could soften synthetic fabrics, such as polyester, which is made from the same kind of plastic used in most beverage bottles.
这些科学家由京都工艺纤维大学的小田耕平教授带领，他的团队在寻找能够软化合成纤维的物质，比如用于制造大多数饮料瓶的塑料材料聚酯纤维。
Oda is a microbiologist, and he believes that whatever scientific problem one faces, microbes have probably already worked out a solution. “I say to people, watch this part of nature very carefully. It often has very good ideas,” Oda told me recently.
小田教授是一位微生物学家，他认为无论人们面临什么科学问题，微生物可能都已经找到了解决办法。小田教授近期告诉我：“我对人们说，仔细观察大自然中的这个领域，这里通常会产生绝妙的灵感。”
What Oda and his colleagues found in that rubbish dump had never been seen before. They had hoped to discover some micro-organism that had evolved a simple way to attack the surface of plastic.
小田教授及其同事在垃圾场里发现的细菌是闻所未闻的。他们原本希望发现某种已经进化出破坏塑料表面的简单方式的微生物。
But these bacteria were doing much more than that -- they appeared to be breaking down plastic fully and processing it into basic nutrients. From our vantage point, hyper-aware of the scale of plastic pollution, the potential of this discovery seems obvious.
但这些细菌的作用远不止于此——它们似乎能完全分解塑料，并将其加工成基本的营养物质。从我们的视角，即对塑料污染规模的认识来看，这一发现的潜力似乎是显而易见的。
But back in 2001--still three years before the term “microplastic” even came into use--it was “not considered a topic of great interest”, Oda said. The preliminary papers on the bacteria his team put together were never published.
但小田教授说，在2001年--当时距离“微塑料”一词开始使用还有三年--这个发现“并没有被人认为是一个非常有趣的话题”。他的团队整理的关于这种细菌的初步论文也从未发表过。
In the years since the group's discovery, plastic pollution has become impossible to ignore. Within that roughly 20-year span, we have generated 2.5bn tonnes of plastic waste and each year we produce about 380 million tonnes more, with that amount projected to triple again by 2060.
研究团队发现这种细菌之后的几年里，塑料污染已经变得无法忽视。在过去大约20年的时间里，我们已经产生了25亿吨塑料垃圾，每年还会新增3.8亿吨，预计到2060年，这一数字还将再增加两倍。
A patch of plastic rubbish seven times the size of Great Britain sits in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and plastic waste chokes beaches and overspills landfills across the world.
在太平洋中央有一个面积相当于七个英国的塑料垃圾堆，世界各地的海滩都塞满了塑料垃圾，垃圾填埋场也充斥着这些废塑料。
At the miniature scale, microplastic and nanoplastic particles have been found in fruits and vegetables, having passed into them through the plants’ roots. And they have been found lodged in nearly every human organ – they can even pass from mother to child through breast milk.
从微观角度来看，微塑料和纳米塑料颗粒已被发现存在于水果和蔬菜中，它们通过根茎进入这些植物。而且它们还被发现几乎存在于人体的所有器官中，甚至可以通过母乳在母婴之间传递。
