Professor Jeong-Min Baik’s research group of the SKKU School of Advanced Materials Science and Engineering has developed a reusable electrokinetic filtration platform capable of filtering more than 99% of ultrafine nanoplastic particles smaller than 50 nm even under commercial-level high-flow conditions.

Plastic pollution, which has surged in recent years through industrialization and the pandemic era, poses a direct threat to human health. In particular, nanoplastics smaller than 100 nm—thousands of times thinner than a human hair—can readily pass through biological membranes in the body and trigger serious diseases such as immune dysregulation and carcinogenicity.

However, conventional water purification systems have struggled to effectively remove nanoplastics of such small sizes, highlighting technological limitations; studies have even reported the presence of hundreds of thousands of particles in a single bottle of bottled water.