Here in this fishing village, on the island of Java, the surf teems with kaleidoscopic color. Each wave is littered with garish bibs and bobs.

The water is speckled with synthetic hues: Coca-Cola red, day-glo green and every other color in the crayon box. There are monochromes as well: buoyant white blobs that, at a distance, look like 1,000 invading jellyfish.

It’s all plastic trash, of course.

Here floats the detritus of 21st-century consumption: soda bottles, Pampers and, since this is Indonesia, lots of instant noodle wrappers.

Those jellyfish? Plastic shopping bags. You can go five kilometers into the sea, the village fishermen say, and never stop seeing those lousy plastic bags.

“It’s infuriating,” says Alec, a 39-year-old mussel catcher. He’s hunched over his boat’s outboard motor with a wrench, face streaked with motor oil. The engine is all gunked up with plastic.

“This happens almost every day,” he says. “We can barely work. No matter where you go, the sea is covered in plastic.”

Like so many other coastal villages around the world, plastic junk has brought ruin to this place. Called Muara Angke, it’s a settlement in the shadow of Jakarta, a megacity generating mountains of trash each day.

These shores were once among the world’s most coveted. For more than a millennium, waves of outsiders — from Hindu conquerors to rapacious Dutch colonists — lusted after the paradisiacal beauty of Java. But today, any seafarer arriving on this beach will find a saltwater garbage dump.

(Kuang Keng Kuek Ser/PRI)

How terrifying. Not just for this village but for every human on the planet.

Westerners too often regard pollution in Asia as a far-flung curiosity — a tragedy to be pitied from a safe distance.

But when someone throws a dirty plastic spoon into the Java Sea, it doesn’t just float in place. Currents can carry it around the world and back in just 25 years.

All the while, it’s disintegrating into toxic crumbs. The ocean and its creatures are now awash in chemicals oozed by plastic — and it’s seeping into human bodies from Bali to Boston.

So ignore the floating spoon at your own peril. Its molecules, hiding in a bite of salmon, may someday swim through your bloodstream.

“We’re all infected with plastic,” says Seattle-based oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer. “Molecules from some kid’s plastic bottle, dropped into the ocean in Asia, are winding up in the food Americans eat.”

Ebbesmeyer is best known for coining the phrase “gyres” — those massive whirlpools of trash swirling in the ocean. Five vortexes of filth now cover a whopping one-quarter of the planet’s surface. They get bigger every year.

As our disposable culture roars along, humans are transforming the ocean into a trash-strewn, cancerous stew. At this rate, by 2050, the seas will actually contain more plastic than fish.