Every single minute of every day, about two truckloads of plastic get dumped into streams, rivers and seas around the world. Here we've only captured a fraction of what's really in the river. Plastic is part of our daily life, but we have to do something to change this. We can't just invade a natural environment with plastic. Microplastic is plastic. Microplastics can now be found everywhere in our food, in Arctic sea ice, in the deep sea.

  Plastic is incredibly long-lasting. I find that quite threatening. And when organisms are affected by it, then we have to do something about it. If we don't act now, the amount of plastic in our seas will have increased four-fold by 2050. Come rain or shine, Chichio Marangione heads out onto the Mar（ 损坏） Piccolo, just like his forefathers（祖先）. This small sea basin connected to the Mediterranean is his stamping ground.

  Muscles have been grown here for centuries in the shallow waters of the Little Sea. In the past, hemp or cotton nets were used. But muscle farmers switched to polypropylene in the late 1960s, and all too often nets end up floating free in the sea. Chichio Marangione sees the impact every day. The plastic on the seabed（海底） starves marine（海的） vegetation（[植]植被） of oxygen and it suffocates. The effect on the environment is severe.

  The sea is like a mama. It's brimming（满溢） with love. But when a child doesn't behave well, she still loves them. But she doesn't respect them as much as a kind one. 50 years of muscle breeding with plastic nets has turned the Mar Piccolo into a trash heap. Every year, ghost nets measuring an area of 78,000 square kilometers, the same size as the Czech Republic（共和国）, end up floating in our seas.

  Muscles grow in tubular polypropylene nets. Over time, saltwater（盐水的）, sun and friction break down the plastic, but it can take 450 years to completely decompose（分解） and toxic（有毒的） substances get released. The 49-year-old is no longer prepared to be a part of that. He's been taking part in a scientific experiment since 2021 and only uses nets made from Matter B, a bioplastic based on maize（玉米） starch（淀粉）. Most muscle breeders are suspicious（可疑的） of this new material. You have to be a very good muscle breeder to work（使工作） with Matter B nets.

  It's more work than with normal plastic. The bioplastic is biodegradable and compostable. It could prove a more eco-friendly alternative to conventional plastic. They're testing whether the new material fulfills Chichio Marangione's requirements. If these nets had only lasted six rather than 18 months, then I would have lost my entire muscle harvest（收割）. I took a big risk.

  I've invested my time and energy in this endeavor for the sake（缘故） of the environment. Most nets made from plastic often end up as death traps, killing creatures, impacting entire submarine habitats, destroying biodiversity（生物多样性）. The people who live from and with the sea have first-hand experience of that. That's why nets made of new materials are being tested in Europe and Asia. Marine biologist（生物学家） Kyara Giomi is testing bioplastic and its environmental impact. After all, many of us eat this seafood.

  I'm really interested in finding out whether the nets make a difference to the quantity of muscles harvested, and also whether the material of the nets could lead to an increase or decrease in the number of tiny organisms living on or in the muscles. Together with Kyara Giomi and her colleague Serena Skotsafava, the muscle farmer wants to find out whether the bioplastic nets will stand the test of time. Most plastic gets washed into the sea by rivers, here in Germany too. It's amazing what's floating in the Rhine, all of this in just two weeks. Nikolas Schweigat was no longer prepared to sit back and watch the rising tide（潮） of plastic. He set up an association called Krakka, which is also the name of its floating litter collector.

  It's made of a basket attached to two pontoons. The open side faces into the current and captures the trash as it floats past. The association's members designed the litter collector together with an engineering company and had it assembled（集合） in a shipyard. For two years, they fought with the authorities to get Germany's first ever river-borne litter collector approved. What we have found has given（做） me a really nasty shock. We're seeing the result of the first rain in a long time.

  Water levels have risen by about 50 centimetres, so everything left lying by the river over the past few months has been swept up. You can see that here. Everything from shoes, bottles, fireworks from last year. There are lighters. Everything that people have left behind on the riverbanks（河堤）. We're finding it here, crazy.

  We weren't expecting so much. As well as a lot of hard work and conviction（深信）, 160,000 euros of donations have been invested in the litter collector, which has to be emptied every two weeks by the volunteers. "Our trash collector is about three metres wide, but the river measures about 200 metres across at this point, so there's a lot of trash that just goes floating past. And I think that we should be worried. We don't have any kind of control of what's floating past every day in the Rhine, of how much trash there is there." Whatever the environmental activists（积极分子） don't retrieve（[计] 检索） from the river ends up in the sea. It's estimated that the Rhine washes about a metric tonne of plastic into the North Sea every day.

  Some of it can hardly be seen with the naked eye. "Look, plastic granules（小粒） everywhere." Biologist Liandra Haman is conducting research in this field. But she wanted to do more. She decided to get involved with the Rhine litter collector in her spare time. "This is just a normal piece of wood and a feather, but there's a lot of microplastic on them. That's because these things collect on the surface and microplastics also float to the surface.

  You can even see what kind of microplastic it is, and that's pretty rare. These are plastic pellets（小球）. They're used to produce plastic products. And sometimes they get lost by accident, from ships, containers or sacks that split during transport and the pellets get lost. Or during production, when the factories are cleaned, they go down the drain. To be honest, I wouldn't have expected there to be so much microplastic."

  The litter collector has been given a one-year permit. The members want to use this time to collect information about the quantity and type of trash in the Rhine. There's no data（资料） of this kind at present. The volunteers sort the trash according to specific criteria. "The EU has created about 200 categories. Many litter collecting associations sort the trash according to those categories.