Bio-friendly Collection of Microplastic and Small Plastic Debris

This Project will design, build, and deploy an innovative bio-friendly technique to help collect microplastic and small plastic debris from the ocean surface before it reaches the coastal areas of northern Australia where removal is impractical. Marine and coastal natural sanctuaries around the Gulf of Carpentaria are under threat due to the widespread pollution of plastics that span a wide range of length scales, from large ghost nets of several kilometres to tiny plastics smaller than five millimetres (microplastics). Microplastics are toxic, almost invisible to the human eye, and invading the marine ecosystem at all trophic levels. Collecting microplastics is an extremely challenging task that our group is going to tackle by using its world-first developed microplastic removal method based on thermophoresis, i.e. the displacement of species in a temperature gradient.