Two teenagers will receive $50,000 for an award-winning microplastic filtration device

• Victoria Ou and Justin Huang, 17, won $50,000 for their microplastic filtration device.
• This is the first filtration system that successfully uses ultrasound to filter microplastics from water.
• They hope to scale their device to water treatment plants to reduce microplastic pollution around the world.

Two teenagers from The Woodlands, Texas, have invented a device that could help fight one of the most pervasive and challenging forms of pollution on Earth: microplastics.

These microscopic plastic particles appear in the deepest parts of the ocean, at the top of Mount Everest, and are present in everything from household dust to food and water.

According to some estimates, each of us inhales and swallows a credit card’s worth of plastic each week. Then it can get into our lungs, blood, breast milk and testicles.

Victoria Ou and Justin Huang, 17, hope to one day prevent this with their award-winning device that removes microplastics from water using ultrasound – high-frequency sound waves. Their device was the first to successfully use this method.

Ou and Huang presented their work at last week’s Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) in Los Angeles, where top science fair competitors from around the world gathered to share their projects and compete for $9 million in prizes.

The Texas duo took first place in the Google-sponsored Earth and Environmental Sciences category and also won a $50,000 prize from the Gordon E. Moore Award for Positive Results for Future Generations.

Although the ultrasonic technique is in its very early stages, the high school students hope that one day it will be able to filter plastic from drinking water and the industrial and sewage effluents that people dump into the environment.

“This is the first year we’ve done this,” Huang told Business Insider backstage after receiving the award. “If we could refine it – maybe use more professional equipment, maybe go to a lab instead of testing at home – we could really improve our device and get it ready for large-scale production.”

While it is unclear how microplastics affect human health, many common chemicals in plastics have been linked to increased risk of cancer, fertility and development problems, and hormonal disruption. And we are still a long way from getting rid of microplastics.

The challenge of filtering microplastics

Last fall, while brainstorming ideas for the ISEF project, Ou and Huang visited a water treatment plant. They wanted to find out whether such plants already had tools that could remove microplastics from wastewater.

They discovered that the answer was no. Workers told Huang and Ou that the EPA does not regulate microplastics, so they do not remove them from wastewater.

“From that moment on, we knew we had to focus on this issue,” Huang told BI.

Huang said that even if the EPA started regulating these harmful plastic particles tomorrow, existing methods for removing them would pose problems.

One solution is to use chemical coagulants such as aluminum hydroxide, which, when added to water, compacts microplastics into larger, easier-to-filter pieces. However, chemical coagulants can also pollute the environment and disturb the pH of purified water. Besides, they are expensive.

Physical filters are also available, but they clog easily. Biological solutions, such as using enzymes to break down plastics, are not effective enough to solve this problem on a large scale.

“We wanted to find a solution to this problem because current solutions are not very effective,” Huang said.

So Ou and Huang – friends since elementary school with a common interest in protecting the environment – ​​decided to come up with their own eco-friendly, affordable and efficient solution.

How it’s working

Huang and Ou’s device is extremely small, about the size of a pen. It is essentially a long tube with two stations of electrical transducers that use ultrasound as a two-stage filter.

As water flows through the device, ultrasonic waves create pressure that pushes the microplastics back while allowing water to continue to flow forward, Ou explained. At the other end, clean, microplastic-free water flows out.

Two teenagers tested their device on three common types of microplastics: polyurethane, polystyrene and polyethylene. According to the press release, their device can remove between 84% and 94% of microplastics from water in one go.

Next job

Ou and Huang believe their technology can be applied to sewage treatment plants, industrial textile plants, sewage treatment plants and rural water sources. On a smaller scale, it could filter microplastics in washing machines or even aquariums.

But first there is more work to be done. “I think we need a lot more processing to get to this stage,” Ou said. “It’s a completely new approach. We found only one study that tried to use ultrasound to predict the flow of particles in water, but it has not yet been able to completely filter them out.”

Huang agrees. “I hope we will be able to scale this up, but first we need to perfect it because the technology is still in its infancy,” he said.

The $50,000 prize can help them do just that. In the meantime, however, they are enjoying the moment.

“We were just happy that we could go to ISEF. We didn’t expect much at first, but winning first place and the grand prize was much more than we expected,” Ou said.

“It’s something I’ve dreamed about my whole life, so I’m still pinching myself trying to figure out if it’s true or not,” Huang said.