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Nearly 50,000kg of nitrogen fertiliser was spread along the shoreline to turbocharge bacterial growth.
人们沿着海岸线撒了近5万公斤的氮肥，目的是加速细菌的生长。
Similarly, when a former industrial site in Stratford, east London, was chosen for the 2012 Olympic Games, the committee charged with cleaning it up moved more than 2,000 dump trucks’ worth of soil contaminated with petroleum and other chemicals to sites where it was pumped full of nitrogen and oxygen for weeks, inducing a bloom of bacterial growth that consumed the toxins.
同样，伦敦东部斯特拉特福德( Stratford)的一个前工业区被选为2012年奥运会的举办地，负责清理该场地的委员会将超过 2000 辆装满受石油和其他化学物质污染的土壤运送到了其他地点，然后在那里向土壤中注入氮气和氧气，注入时间持续数周，以此促进消耗土壤毒素的细菌的大量繁殖。
The soil was returned to Stratford, and the Olympic park sits atop it now.
之后，这些土壤被送回了斯特拉特福德，现在奥林匹克公园就坐落在这片土壤上。
The question of whether the same could be accomplished with plastic in the environment has received far less interest – and funding – than the prospect of more effective recycling.
同样的方法是否也可以解决环境中的塑料问题，人们对这个问题的兴趣和资金投入远不如提高回收效率的可能性高。
“There is not exactly a market incentive to clean up our waste, whether it’s CO2, or plastic,” says Victor di Lorenzo, a scientist at the Spanish National Biotechnology Centre in Madrid, and an evangelist for the large-scale application of microbes to solve humanity’s problems.
位于马德里的西班牙国家生物技术中心的科学家维克多·迪·洛伦佐主张大规模应用微生物来解决人类的问题，他说：“无论是二氧化碳还是塑料，清理这些废物都缺乏市场激励。”
“There is a return on investment to recycle plastic. But who will pay for these larger-scale projects that would help wider society? This is something only public support would remedy.”
“回收塑料的投资是有回报的。但谁将为这些能够造福于更广泛社会的大型项目买单呢? 这是只有公众支持才能解决的问题。”
Aside from the market problem, there is also a legal one.
除了市场问题，还有法律担忧。
Once a microbial species has been genetically engineered, almost every country restricts its release back into the wild without special permission - which is rarely granted. The reasons for this are obvious.
一旦一种微生物经基因改造，如果没有特殊许可，几乎每个国家都会限制将其释放回野外环境中。这种许可极难获取，原因也显而易见。
In the 1971 science fiction story Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater, a virus with the ability to instantaneously melt plastic spreads across the world, knocking planes out of the air and collapsing houses.
在 1971 年出版的科幻小说《59 号突变体：塑料吞噬者》中，一种具有瞬间融化塑料能力的病毒在世界各地传播，导致飞机从空中坠落、房屋倒塌。
It is unlikely any plastic-eating bacteria would become that efficient, but perturbing microbes can have devastating consequences.
任何分解塑料的细菌都不太可能如此高效，但扰乱微生物确实可能会造成毁灭性的后果。
