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Current methods of breaking down or recycling plastics are woefully inadequate.
目前塑料分解或回收的方法仍然存在严重不足。
The vast majority of plastic recycling involves a crushing and grinding stage, which frays and snaps the fibres that make up plastic, leaving them in a lower-quality state.
绝大多数的塑料回收都会涉及到粉碎和研磨阶段，这一阶段会使构成塑料的纤维磨损、折断，导致其质量降低。
While a glass or aluminium container can be melted down and reformed an unlimited number of times, the smooth plastic of a water bottle, say, degrades every time it is recycled.
玻璃或铝制容器可以无限次熔化和重塑，而光滑的塑料水瓶每次回收都会发生降解。
A recycled plastic bottle becomes a mottled bag, which becomes fibrous jacket insulation, which then becomes road filler, never to be recycled again.
回收后的塑料瓶会变成斑驳的袋子，再变成纤维绝缘层，最后成为路面填料，直至再也无法被回收利用。
And that is the best case scenario.
而这是最好的情况。
In reality, hardly any plastic – just 9% – ever enters a recycling plant.
实际上，几乎只有不到9%的塑料会进入回收厂。
The sole permanent way we’ve found to dispose of plastic is incineration, which is the fate of nearly 70 million tonnes of plastic every year – but incineration drives the climate crisis by releasing the carbon in the plastic into the air, as well as any noxious chemicals it might be mixed with.
我们发现目前唯一永久的处理塑料的方式是焚烧，而焚烧是每年近7000万吨塑料的宿命。但是，焚烧会释放塑料中的碳以及与之混合的有毒化学物质进入空气，从而加剧气候危机。
In the years after their discovery, Oda and his student Kazumi Hiraga, now a professor, continued corresponding and conducting experiments.
在发现这种细菌后的几年里，小田教授和他如今已成为教授的学生平贺和三一直保持着联系并进行着实验。
When they finally published their work in the prestigious journal Science in 2016, it emerged into a world desperate for solutions to the plastic crisis, and it was a blockbuster hit.
2016 年，全球都在迫切寻找应对塑料危机的解决方案，当他们最终在《科学》杂志上发表关于这一发现的论文后，引起了不小的轰动。
Oda and his colleagues named the bacterium that they had discovered in the rubbish dump Ideonella sakaiensis – after the city of Sakai, where it was found – and in the paper, they described a specific enzyme that the bacterium was producing, which allowed it to break down polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the most common plastic found in clothing and packaging.
小田教授及其同事将他们在垃圾场中发现的这种细菌命名为大阪堺菌(Ideonella sakaiensis)——以细菌发现地日本大阪府辖下的堺市(Sakai)命名--他们在论文中指出这种细菌会产生一种特定酶，这种酶可以分解聚对苯二甲酸乙二醇酯(PET)。PET是服装和包装中最常见的塑料。
The paper was reported widely in the press, and it currently has more than 1,000 scientific citations, placing it in the top 0.1% of all papers.
这篇论文被媒体广泛报道，目前已有超过1000次的科学引用，名列所有论文的前 0.1%。
