Removing Microplastics from Lake Michigan
Team Members Heading link
- Amin Abderrazzaq
- Abdallah Adi
- Reem Merei
- Rami Zahran
Project Description Heading link
It has been estimated that five trillion pieces of plastic float in the world’s oceans today. As staggering a number as this is, the estimate is based only on plastic visible to humans. What about plastic too small to be seen by the naked eye? Plastic on this scale is called microplastic. Microplastics are prevalent in all ecosystems because of their osmotic transport by water through the interconnected network of rivers/streams, lakes/ponds, and groundwater with the ocean. This project proposes a mobile machine that removes microplastics from water. The mechanism consists of a system of sieves that iteratively removes plastic and microplastic in order of decreasing diameter. Existing removal technologies targeting plastic and microplastic in the ocean are not very viable. Existing technologies are operated on enormous scales with anchors that span huge lengths of the ocean floor and large barriers that negatively affect the natural flow within an aquatic environment. To overcome existing design limitations, mobility has been incorporated as a primary project objective. System mobility allows for greater application and target specificity of polluted regions. Pending successful design mobility, a GPS unit will be installed in order to track the system’s location in real-time. The project team will be observing and collecting data from Lake Michigan in order to build our prototype. With the data collected from Lake Michigan, the microplastics removal prototype can then be scaled to size accordingly.