Hey, check this out.
Those are microplastics, but the vast majority don’t come from beads in facial scrub, they
come from our clothing, tires, water bottles, and the million other things we make out of
plastic, microplastics pose a threat to our ocean and other waterways as well as the life
that depends on them...
including us.
And this magnetic liquid may just be the solution for getting it out.
Or at least *a* solution.
I want to say upfront that by far the greatest threat of plastic ending up in our planet’s
water is the fact that we just keep producing tons of it and extracting the fossil fuels
that make plastic possible.
And to make matters worse, most of us think of plastic things as disposable.
Heck, expressly disposable things like cutlery are usually made of plastic.
So, this problem won’t be anywhere near solved until we can cut ourselves off from
plastic.
That being said, we currently produce over 300 million tons of plastic waste each year,
so there’s A LOT of plastic that has made its way to our waterways and ocean.
Despite the headline-grabbing garbage patches in the ocean, it’s not those large pieces
of plastic trash that pose the biggest hurdle to removing plastic from the ocean or other
waterways, or at least not yet.
Exposure to waves, wind, and sunlight break larger plastics down into smaller and smaller
pieces.
But unlike many other materials that may end up in the water or soil, nearly no microorganisms
can break plastic down, so plastic we throw out can stick around for potentially thousands
of years or longer.
Getting those big pieces of plastic out of the water isn’t exactly easy, there are
many projects working on removing it, but it’s expensive and can sometimes do more
harm to the marine life we’re purportedly saving from this plastic.
But how do you remove millions of tons of tiny pieces of plastic that are 5mm in size
or smaller?
That’s the problem of microplastics.
One of the most popular tactics is developing plastic-eating bacteria, which there has been
some success with but isn’t ready to work at scale.
There are a ton of videos on YouTube about that already, but I recently came across a
really interesting approach to microplastics removal I’d never heard of that I needed
to talk about.
And it was invented by this Irish teenager, Fionn Ferreira.
Fionn figured out how to use what’s called a ferrofluid to extract microplastic from
water.
He won a Google Science Fair award for it at 18 in 2019, but apparently started working
on this when he was 12.
Growing up near a shore where lots of plastic trash ends up on the beach, he heard about
and became concerned about microplastics at a young age.
This tiny plastic gets eaten by fish and other marine life and can block their digestive
tracts and even make them feel “full” which can starve them to death.
And much of the seafood we eat, even the farmed ones, are full of plastic too.
We know that the stuff plastic is made of is not safe to ingest, but it's unclear if
the amount that gets in us is negligible to our health.
Unlike with animals, we can’t exactly just feed someone plastic and find out.
But with more and more plastic ending up in our water, more and more is ending up in us.
We’re still very much figuring out the extent of the harm microplastics are creating for
us and ocean life, but a study by the University of Newcastle found that just by drinking water
or even beer and eating stuff like shellfish and salt we’re ingesting 5 grams of plastic
every week.
That’s like eating a credit card every week.
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Right, Fionn and his invention.
So, one of the wildest parts of his story is that, according to him, living in a particularly
remote part of Ireland meant he didn’t have access to many scientific tools, so he decided
to build them himself.
He very casually explains in some interviews that he built his own spectrometer in a wooden
box to measure microplastic density.
Apparently he got his idea for the ferrofluid invention when he found some plastic attached
to spilled oil on a beach shore.
From there he found research by physicist Arden Warner, who after seeing news of the
BP oil spill discovered a novel way of cleaning up oil spills.
Warner realized that he could mix iron shavings with oil and then use a magnet to pull both
the shavings and the oil attached to it out of the water.
So Fionn thought, hey, why not see if you can mix oil and iron shavings with water containing
microplastics and pull everything but the water out with a magnet.
He ran a test and it seemed to work.
Then he ran 5,000 more using a variety of different kinds of microplastics including
from car tires and polyester clothing fibers and meticulously counted the amount of plastic
in the water using his homemade spectrometer.
In the end he found his method was 87% effective at removing microplastics.
He’s since won a Google Science Fair and is currently working on developing a larger
scale prototype.
This method could also be used to create filters for water management to remove microplastics
as they flow through.
Or even installed in washing machines, which add a surprising amount of microplastics to
our water from our clothing.
Of course, when I saw Fionn doing what seemed like a fairly simple experiment at home, I
had to try it out.
And it didn’t really workout for me, I didn’t have time to figure it out before putting
this video together so, here are the results of what I actually got to.
I have the iron fillings and I have some oil; I don’t think I had small enough microplastics.
I’ll leave this one to the experts.