In many ways, plastic is the perfect material—we can make it strong and rigid enough to build spaceships and replace bones, or thin and flexible enough to make shopping bags that weigh as much as a nickel but carry up to eight kilograms. And unlike other materials, plastic doesn't rust or rot. It can last for centuries, even when we only need it to last a few seconds. We make tons of plastic precisely because it's cheap, durable and yet expendable. But the features of plastic that make it so useful to us have also transformed life in the oceans, where as much as 10 percent of our discarded plastic, millions of tons per year, ends up.

就许多方面来说，塑胶是完美材料－－我们可以让它强韧坚固到足以建造宇宙飞船和替代骨骼，或让它够轻薄且有弹力，可以做出和五分钱硬币重量相同但却能耐重到八公斤的购物袋。和其它材料不一样，塑胶不会生锈或腐坏。它可以存在好几世纪，即使当我们只需要它存在几秒钟时。我们正是因为塑胶便宜、耐用但又可抛弃才大量制造。不过这些让塑胶对人类而言如此有益的特性也改变了海洋中的生命，我们抛弃的塑胶有差不多百分之十，也就是每年数百万吨，最后沉入海洋。

 

Big pieces of plastic are definitely bad news for marine animals like whales, albatross, and sea turtles, which risk getting tangled in the debris or ingesting large pieces of it. Yet, despite the publicity about huge garbage patches in the sea, most of the ocean's plastic isn't big. Our castaway shopping bags and soda bottles get weakened by sunlight and torn apart in the wind and the waves into little bits of plastic confetti. On the microscale, though, it's still super durable. The microorganisms that decompose ripped-up bits of wood and seaweed down into simpler organic compounds can't easily digest plastic. So while the plastic confetti gets broken into smaller pieces, it doesn't go away. It just spreads out over time, which is why we've found microplastics pretty much everywhere in the oceans, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, and from the seafloor to the surface.

大型塑胶对像鲸鱼、信天翁和海龟这些海洋动物来说无疑是坏消息，牠们会有困在垃圾残骸或吞下大块塑胶的风险。然而，尽管人们关切大面积的海洋垃圾带，大多数的海洋塑胶并不庞大。我们丢弃的购物袋和汽水瓶会因阳光变脆弱，接着在风及海浪中被分裂成微小的塑胶碎屑。虽然体积变得极为微小，塑胶还是能撑超级久。将木头和海草碎屑分解成更简单的有机化合物的微生物无法轻易消化塑胶。所以尽管塑胶碎屑被分解成更小块了，它还是不会消失。它只会随着时间扩散，这也就是为什么我们几乎在海洋的每个角落都发现微塑胶，从北极到南极，从海底到海面。

 

nlike the easy-to-observe impacts of large plastic trash, the effects of microplastics are as subtle and difficult to trace as the fragments themselves. The durable fragments can serve as new real estate on which small ocean creatures grow and multiply, or choke slightly larger ocean creatures that think the plastics are food, or attract and collect toxic chemicals which become introduced into the food chain if the particles are eaten, and probably a million other problems we haven't noticed yet, because we've only recently started paying attention to all these microplastics in the oceans. But it's undeniable how much plastic trash we've introduced into marine ecosystems, and the wonderful durability of plastic guarantees it'll be an issue for years to come.

 

和大型塑胶垃圾很容易就能观察到的影响不同，微塑胶的影响就和那些碎屑本身一般微妙且难以追踪。这些能存在很久的碎屑可以作为小型海洋生物生长和繁殖的新家，或让以为这些塑胶是食物的稍大型海洋生物噎死，或引来和收集若塑胶颗粒被吞下时就会进到食物链的有毒化学物，或许还有一百万个我们还没注意到的其它麻烦，因为我们是在最近才开始注意到海洋里这所有微塑胶。不过我们带给海洋生态系统多少塑胶垃圾是无可否认的事实，而塑胶极佳的耐用度也保证了它在未来几年会是一项议题。

It's possible we can decrease further impacts by switching to biodegradable plastics, dumping less plastic in the oceans, or cleaning up the patches of sea most strewn with plastic. But until we do, the question is, Will the oceans be plastic enough to deal with our favorite material?

我们有可能可以藉着改用可生物分解塑胶、丢较少塑胶到海洋里来减低更长远的冲击，或清理散布最多塑胶的海洋区。但直到我们那样做之前，问题是，海洋有跟塑胶一样顽强到能对付我们最爱的材料吗？