The plastics industry has long hyped recycling, even though it is well awarethat it’s been a failure. Worldwide, only 9 percent of plastic waste actually gets recycled. In the United States, the rate is now 5 percent. Most used plastic is landfilled, incinerated, or winds up drifting around the environment.

塑料工业长期以来一直在大肆宣传回收利用，尽管它很清楚这是一个失败。在全球范围内，只有9%的塑料垃圾被回收。在美国，这个比率现在是5%。大多数使用过的塑料都被填埋、焚烧或在环境中漂流。

Now, an alarming new study has found that even when plastic makes it to a recycling center, it can still end up splintering into smaller bits that contaminate the air and water. This pilot study focused on a single new facility where plastics are sorted, shredded, and melted down into pellets. Along the way, the plastic is washed several times, sloughing off microplastic particles—fragments smaller than 5 millimeters—into the plant’s wastewater.

现在，一项令人担忧的新研究发现，即使塑料被送到回收中心，它最终仍可能分裂成更小的碎片，污染空气和水。这项试点研究集中在一个新设施上，在那里塑料被分类、切碎并融化成颗粒。在这个过程中，塑料被冲洗了几次，脱落的塑料微粒——小于5毫米的碎片——进入了工厂的废水中。

Because there were multiple washes, the researchers could sample the water at four separate points along the production line. (They are not disclosing the identity of the facility’s operator, who cooperated with their project.) This plant was actually in the process of installing filters that could snag particles larger than 50 microns (a micron is a millionth of a meter), so the team was able to calculate the microplastic concentrations in raw versus filtered discharge water—basically a before-and-after snapshot of how effective filtration is.

因为有多个清洗环节，研究人员可以在生产线上的四个不同点取样。(他们没有透露该设施运营商的身份，该运营商与他们的项目合作。)这家工厂实际上正在安装过滤器，可以拦截大于50微米的颗粒(一微米是百万分之一米)，所以研究小组能够计算出未经处理的水和过滤后的排放水中的微塑料浓度——基本上是过滤效果前后的快照。

Their microplastics tally was astronomical. Even with filtering, they calculate that the total discharge from the different washes could produce up to 75 billion particles per cubic meter of wastewater. Depending on the recycling facility, that liquid would ultimately get flushed into city water systems or the environment. In other words, recyclers trying to solve the plastics crisis may in fact be accidentally exacerbating the microplastics crisis, which is coating every corner of the environment with synthetic particles.

他们得到的微塑料数量是个天文数字。即使经过过滤，他们计算出不同洗车场的总排放物在每立方米的废水中可能产生多达750亿个颗粒。 根据回收设施的不同，这些液体最终会被冲入城市供水系统或环境。换句话说，试图解决塑料危机的回收商实际上可能会意外地加剧微塑料危机，合成颗粒正覆盖环境的每个角落。