Sadly, we know that microplastics are getting everywhere, including our drinking water – but researchers have developed a new way to tackle the problem: a filter made of a rather unusual combination of material, which is able to remove up to 99.9 percent of tiny plastic fragments from water.
The researchers, led by a team from Wuhan University in China, combined both chitin (derived from squid bone) and cellulose (derived from cotton) for their ‘Ct-Cel’ foam filter. Both materials are found in abundance in nature, cheap to adapt, and sustainable.
They then tested their filter against numerous different types of plastic, finding it did an excellent job with a wide variety of fragment sizes and plastic types – including some of those most commonly seen in microplastic pollution.
