A team of researchers from Pakistan and Australia has developed powder adsorbents capable of removing microplastics and other contaminants from wastewater at lightning speed.
The material, which looks like an ordinary powder, comprises microscopic and ferromagnetic “nanopillard structures”. The carefully-designed particles are composed of two sheets (two-dimensional) of metal-organic framework (MOF), with an array of carbon-encapsulated iron oxide nanopillars sandwiched in a gap between them.
It can also mop up microplastics 1,000 times smaller than those currently detectable by most advanced treatment plants ever existed. By contrast, conventional purification techniques take days to complete and only capture a few millimetres of plastic particles, but tinier microplastics could only be captured after this invention.