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科学家们发现了对抗塑料垃圾的新方法

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2019年08月18日

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Scientists finding new ways to fight plastic waste

科学家们发现了对抗塑料垃圾的新方法

National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) scientist Gregg Beckham is an avid scuba diver. So he’s seen the problem of plastics in the world’s oceans firsthand.

美国国家可再生能源实验室(NREL)科学家格雷格·贝克汉姆是一位狂热的潜水爱好者。所以他亲眼目睹了世界海洋中的塑料问题。

“I’ve been going to some places fairly frequently for the last 15 or so years,” he said, “and the prevalence of plastics that I’ve observed anecdotally in the ocean has certainly increased at least in the places that I frequent.”

“在过去的15年左右,我经常去一些地方,”他说,“而且,我在海洋中所观察到的塑料垃圾越来越多,至少在我经常去的地方是这样。”

科学家们发现了对抗塑料垃圾的新方法

Beckham’s sorrow about the situation has turned into a drive to make a difference. “It’s something that as a scientist and an engineer I’m very motivated to start working on it to see if we can come up with solutions to fix this big problem.”

贝克汉姆对现状的悲伤已经转化为一种改变现状的动力。“作为一名科学家和工程师,我非常有动力开始研究这个问题,看看我们能否找到解决这个大问题的办法。”

The problem is massive, according to Nick Mallos, Director of The Ocean Conservancy’s Trash Free Seas Program. Said Mallos: “We know that 8 million metric tons of plastic enters the ocean every year. To put that into perspective that is roughly a New York City dump truck full of plastic emptying into the ocean every minute of every day for an entire year.”

海洋保护协会无垃圾海洋项目主任尼克·马洛斯表示,这个问题非常严重。马洛斯说:“我们知道每年有800万吨塑料进入海洋。从这个角度来看,这大概是一辆纽约市的自卸车,装满塑料,每天每分钟都排入大海,持续了整整一年。”

In an effort to help, Beckham and his teams have been trying to find ways to make discarded PET plastic, the kind used in bottles, containers and polyester, more valuable to recycle, thus giving people a reason to keep it out of landfills and waterways in the first place.

为了提供帮助,贝克汉姆和他的团队一直在努力寻找方法,让废弃的PET塑料(用于瓶子、容器和聚酯纤维)更有价值地回收利用,从而让人们有理由把它们放在垃圾填埋场和水道之外。

“You don’t find many aluminum cans in the ocean because there’s a good way to recycle aluminum,” points out NREL Director Martin Keller. “It’s an established, very well-developed method. So we need the same type of recycling method for plastic.”

NREL主管MartinKeller指出:“在海洋中,你找不到很多铝罐,因为有一种回收铝的好方法。”“这是一种既定的、非常成熟的方法。所以我们需要同样的塑料回收方法。”

One breakthrough came as a pleasant surprise while Beckham and colleagues worked with researchers in London. They were studying the structure of an enzyme in a bacteria that was found to be eating plastic outside a bottle recycling plant in Japan.

当贝克汉姆和他的同事与伦敦的研究人员一起工作时,一项突破性进展让他们惊喜不已。他们正在研究一种细菌的一种酶的结构,这种细菌在日本一家瓶子回收厂外“吃”塑料。

“We thought we were gonna make the enzyme worse and in doing so understand how it evolved to break down plastic,” Beckham explained. “We actually accidentally made it better, which was pretty exciting.”

贝克汉姆解释说:“我们认为我们会使这种酶变得更糟,这样我们就能理解它是如何进化来分解塑料的。”“我们实际上是意外地把它做得更好,这非常令人兴奋。”

In nature, the enzyme takes centuries to degrade PET plastic. Beckham said the mutated enzyme now does the work in weeks or months, “And we’re working to make it where we can actually get it down to days, which will be really exciting.”

在自然界中,这种酶需要几个世纪才能降解PET塑料。贝克汉姆说,这种突变酶现在只需几周或几个月就能完成这项工作,“我们正在努力使它能在几天内完成,这将非常令人兴奋。”

A second big breakthrough involves taking ground-up plastic bottles and mixing them with a biodegradable substance found in plants. “When we combine those in a very specific way, we can make a completely new type of plastic material that’s like a composite.”

第二个重大突破是将粉碎的塑料瓶与植物中发现的可生物降解物质混合。“当我们以一种非常特殊的方式把它们结合起来,我们就能制造出一种全新的塑料材料,就像一种复合材料。”

It’s the same kind of composite material already being added to fiberglass to make things like surfboards, snowboards, car parts and wind turbine blades.

这种复合材料已经被添加到玻璃纤维中,用于制造冲浪板、滑雪板、汽车零部件和风力涡轮机叶片。

Nick Rorrer is a postdoctoral researcher at NREL who’s involved in the research. “One of the awesome things about our work,” he said, “is we found that when we used both PET bottles and stuff that you get from biomass, you actually get better properties than what you would get using the typical kind of petroleum recipes for the manufacturing.”

NickRorrer是NREL的博士后研究员,他参与了这项研究。他说:“我们工作中最棒的一件事是,我们发现,当我们同时使用PET瓶和从生物质中获得的原料时,实际上你得到的性能比使用典型的石油配方制造的产品要好。”

科学家们发现了对抗塑料垃圾的新方法

The result is something not only much stronger than today’s oil-based material but lighter, too.

其结果不仅比现在的油基材料更坚固,而且也更轻。

The hope, Beckham said, is that scientific breakthroughs like these will make plastic much likely to be reused.

贝克汉姆说,希望像这样的科学突破能让塑料更容易被再利用。

Mallos said the research is exciting. “Finding new materials or new approaches to break down plastics or recycle plastics is absolutely a piece of the puzzle.” He cautioned, however, that “it’s critical that we don’t place too much weight in any one solution. We need a comprehensive approach to solve this problem globally.”

马洛斯说,这项研究令人兴奋。“找到新材料或新方法来分解塑料或回收塑料绝对是一个难题。然而,他警告说,“关键是我们不能在任何一种解决方案中都放太多分量。”我们需要一个全面的方法来解决这个全球性的问题。”

“It’s one part of a multipart solution to overcoming this problem,” Beckham agreed. “Part of the solution has to be reduced use of, especially, single-use plastics around the world, as well as on top of that, both governments and industry coming together to put incentives in place to reclaim waste plastics.”

“这是克服这个问题的多部分解决方案的一部分,”贝克汉姆同意。“一部分解决方案是减少世界各地一次性塑料的使用,尤其是减少一次性塑料的使用。除此之外,各国政府和工业界都齐心协力,采取措施回收废塑料。”

NREL plans to have a pilot program up and running within a couple of years that will break down a ton of PET plastic every day. The product will be used to make turbine blades at the National Wind Technology Center nearby.

NREL计划在几年内启动并运行一个试验项目,该项目将每天分解一吨PET塑料。该产品将用于在附近的国家风能技术中心制造涡轮叶片。


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