Microplastics—tiny pieces of plastic smaller than five millimeters across—are everywhere, from snow in the Arctic and rain in the Rocky Mountains to bottled water and beer. On the ocean floor, there may be nearly 16 million metric tons of it. In the top 200 meters of the Atlantic Ocean, there may be 21 million more metric tons. It’s in lakes. It’s in rivers. It’s even on Mount Everest. And the smaller it gets, the harder it is to remove from water; technology attempting to clean up water usually focuses on catching larger pieces of plastic before they break down.
At a lab in the Czech Republic, researchers are developing tiny robots that could help. The microscopic robots “are moving machines the size of a red blood cell,” says Martin Pumera, a chemistry professor and director of the Center for the Advanced Functional Nanorobots at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague. “They don’t have wheels or flippers or engines,” he says. Instead, they’re made of material that is propelled forward when exposed to sunlight. And when material comes into contact with microplastic, it rapidly speeds up the degradation of plastic that happens naturally in the sun. As the tiny robots move through water—several millimeters per second, fast for their size—they can continue encountering more plastic and help decompose it.
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