April 25, 2022
As billions of tons of plastic waste have accumulated in the environment, microplastics are getting even harder to remove.
Scientists find microplastics everywhere they look: rivers and the ocean, Arctic snow, rain falling on cities and national parks, seafood, bottled water and beer, and even deep inside human lungs. As billions of tons of plastic waste have accumulated in the environment and the fragments keep getting smaller, microplastics are getting even harder to remove. But a new type of sponge could help pull them out of water.
Vinayak Dravid, a materials science and engineering professor at Northwestern University, is leading the development of multiple variations of the technology. “The basic idea is that we have an affinity coating that acts as a glue, and it attracts the pollutant,” he says.
Researchers started with the challenge of oil spills, developing a patented nanotechnology coating that attracts oil and repels water; if a thin layer is added to a sponge, the sponge can collect 30 times its weight in oil. Then the oil can be squeezed out and recovered, and the sponge can be reused repeatedly.