Like the lead paint and asbestos of decades past, microplastics are the new awful contaminant that we really ought to do something about. They’re particularly abundant in the aquatic environment, and that’s not a good thing. While we’ve all seen heartbreaking photos of beaches strewn with water bottles and fishing nets, it’s the invisible threat that keeps environmentalists up at night. We’re talking about microplastics – those tiny fragments that are quietly infiltrating every corner of our oceans.
We’ve dumped billions of tons of plastic waste into our environment, and all that waste breaks down into increasingly smaller particles that never truly disappear. Now, scientists are turning to an unexpected solution to clean up this pollution with the aid of seashells and plants.
Sticky Solution
A team of researchers has developed what amounts to a fancy sponge for sucking up microplastics, made using readily available natural materials—chitin from marine creatures, and cellulose from plants. When these materials are processed just right, they form a super-porous foam that readily “adsorbs” microplastic material, removing it from the water. If you’re not familiar with the term, adsorbtion is simple—it refers to material clinging on to the surface of a solid, rather than being absorbed into it.
To create the material, researchers took chitin and cellulose, and broke down the natural hydrogen bonds in both materials, which allowed them to be reconstructed into a new foam-like form. The result is a very porous material that has negatively- and positively-charged areas on the surface that can effectively bond with microplastic particles. Indeed, the foam effectively grabs plastic particles through a combination of electrostatic attraction, physical entrapment, and other intramolecular forces. It both attracts microplastics via physical forces and entangles them, too.
The foam is assembled from chitin and cellulose, with the aid of some readily-available reagents. Credit: Research paper
The foam performed well in testing, capturing from 98% to 99.9% of microplastics. Even more impressive, the foam maintained a removal efficiency above 95% even after five usage cycles, a positive sign for its practical longevity. The material shows particular affinity for common plastics that show up in litter and other waste streams—like polystyrene, polypropylene, polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA).
Of course, polluted water on Earth is a more complex mix than just water and plastic. Take a sample and you’re going to find lots of organic matter, bacteria, and other pollutants mixed in. The researchers put their foam through its paces with four different samples from real-world contexts—taken from agriculture irrigation, lake waters, still water, and coastal waters. While contaminants like ethanol and methylene blue cut the adsorption capacity of the foam by up to 50%, that wasn’t the case all round. Surprisingly, some contaminants actually improved its performance. When heavy metals like lead were present, the foam’s plastic-capturing ability increased, and it gained a similar benefit from the presence of bacteria like e.Coli. Testing like this is crucial for proving the foam’s viability outside of simple laboratory tests. Removing plastic from clean water is one thing; removing it from real samples is another thing entirely.
The foam is able to ensnare microplastic particles in a variety of ways—pure mechanical entrapment, electrostatic attraction, and other intramolecular forces. Credit: Research paper
The beauty of this approach lies in its simplicity and accessibility. Unlike some high-tech solutions requiring expensive materials or complex manufacturing, the foam is made out of materials that can be sourced in abundance. Chitin is readily available from seafood processing waste, and cellulose can be sourced from agricultural byproducts. The research paper also explains the basic methods of preparing the hybrid foam material, which are well within the abilities of any competent lab and chemical engineer.
Some environmental contaminants hurt the performance of the foam, but others are actually beneficial to its plastic-trapping mission. Credit: Research paper
While this foam won’t single-handedly solve our ocean plastic crisis, it represents a promising direction in environmental remediation. The challenge now lies in scaling up production and developing practical deployment methods for real-world conditions. Developing the foam was step one—the next step involves figuring out how to actually put it to good use to sieve the oceans clean. Stopping plastic contamination at the source is of course the ideal, but for all the plastic that’s already out there, there’s still a lot to be done.
Featured image: “Microplastic” by Oregon State University
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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By Nermeen Nabil Khear 
