Magnetic springs help break down microplastics in the ocean. Photo: Shutterstock
A lot of people want to clean up our planet. It’s a noble cause. A worthy one, for sure. The most visible efforts seem to be Boyan Slat’s Ocean Cleanup, collecting as much of the piled-up patches of garbage floating in the Pacific, and a healthy handful of corporations and even local governments who are finding ways to make it more difficult for people to litter. But even if we collect every plastic straw, old cigarette, and empty bag floating in the abyss, there’s still a lofty task left of those pesky microplastics.
When you really dive into them and learn the nuts and bolts of how ocean pollution works, microplastics are the kind of stuff that makes the whole problem an obvious, disgusting mess. The basic idea is that plastics break down into smaller and smaller parts over time but, as we know, aren’t biodegradable. So the tiniest pieces of microplastics remain, being eaten up by fish or staying in the water. The NOAA conducts research to understand their full impact on the environment, but the doomsday picture that’s painted from it all is that in a twisted “circle of life” cycle, you’re eventually consuming those microplastics all over again. So, obviously, we should want to clean all this up.
A team of researchers in Australia designed a magnetic spring (or coil) they believe can help with this part of the job.
“Microplastics adsorb organic and metal contaminants as they travel through water and release these hazardous substances into aquatic organisms when eaten, causing them to accumulate all the way up the food chain,” says Shaobin Wang, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Adelaide. “Carbon nanosprings are strong and stable enough to break these microplastics down into compounds that do not pose such a threat to the marine ecosystem.”
You’d probably like to see a good old fashioned picture of this invention, but Wang and his team didn’t offer one in their lengthy report, which details experiments to understand how plastics break down and how certain chemicals can spark reactions from their microplastics. By coating carbon nanotubes with nitrogen, they produced what’s called reactive oxygen species, which apparently intercept and collect microplastics as they break down.
“Having magnetic nanotubes is particularly exciting because this makes it easy to collect them from real wastewater streams for repeated use in environmental remediation,” said Xiaoguang Duan, a chemical engineering research fellow at Adelaide.
