You’ve heard that plastic is polluting the oceans—between 4.8 and 12.7 million tonnes enter ocean ecosystems every year. But does one plastic straw or cup really make a difference? Artist Benjamin Von Wong wants you to know that it does. He builds massive sculptures out of plastic garbage, foreing viewers to re-examine their relationship to single-use plastic products.
你听说过塑料正在污染海洋——每年有480万到1270万吨塑料进入海洋生态系统。但是，一根塑料吸管或杯子真的能带来变化吗？艺术家本杰明·冯·黄想让你知道这是真的。他用塑料垃圾建造了巨大的雕塑，让观众重新审视他们与一次性塑料制品的关系。

At the beginning of the year, the artist built a piece called“Strawpocalypse,” a pair of 10-foot-tall plastic waves, frozen mid-crash. Made of 168,000 plastic straws collected from several volunteer beach cleanups, the sculpture made its first appearance at the Estella Place shopping center in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
今年年初，这位艺术家创作了一幅名为“Strawpocalypse”的作品，这是一对10英尺高的塑料波浪，凝结在半空，由从几次海滩清理志愿者中收集的168,000根塑料吸管制成，首次出现在越南胡志明市的埃斯黛拉广场购物中心。

Just 9% of global plastic waste is recycled. Plastic straws are by no means the biggest source of plastic pollution, but they’ve recently come under fire because most people don’t need them to drink with and, because of their small size and weight, they cannot be recycled. Every straw that' s part of Von Wong's artwork likely came from a drink that someone used for only a few minutes. Once the drink is gone, the straw will take centuries to disappear.
全球只有9%的塑料垃圾被回收利用。塑料吸管绝不是的塑料污染的最大来源，但最近它们受到了猛烈抨击，因为大多数人不需要用吸管喝饮料，而且由于它们体积小、重量轻，无法回收。冯·黄作品中的每一根吸管都可能来自一种只喝了几分钟的饮料。一旦饮料消失，吸管需要几个世纪才能消失。

In a piece from 2018, Von Wong wanted to illustrate a specific statistic: Every 60 seconds, a truckload's worth of plastic enters the ocean. For this work, titled "Truckload of Plastic, "Von Wong and a group of volunteers collected more than 10,000 pieces of plastic, which were then tied together to look like they’d been dumped from a truck all at once.
在2018年的一篇文章中，冯·黄想举例说明具体的统计数据：每60秒，一卡车的塑料进入海洋。在这项名为“一卡车塑料”的作品中，冯·黄和一群志愿者收集了1万多块塑料，然后将它们绑在一起，看起来像是突然从卡车上被倾倒了下来。

Von Wong hopes that his work will also help pressure big companies to reduce their plastic footprint.
冯·黄希望他的工作也能帮助大公司减少塑料足迹。