two New Jersey college students are taking on the next big battle in the effort to keep our water clean the Princeton grad students created a first of its kind filtration system targeting and removing microplastics from water sources and now they're putting it into action for the first time ever partnering with the Atlantic County Utilities Authority to install and test their filter senior correspondent Joanna Gagis spoke with the students about how it could be a game changer for people living in the state why are we focusing on microplastic well there are two factors that make them very alarming one they're pervasive they're in lakes rivers oceans they're everywhere and once they are leaked into the environment it is almost impossible to collect them again there's also no developed system to filter microplastics out of water at least until now that's the work of Yidian Lu and Nathaniel Banks co-founders of PolyGone who met while graduate students at Princeton University they developed a prototype that's being piloted at the ACUA the Atlantic County Utilities Authority ultimately we came up with the idea of how can we uh sort of simulate or emulate the effects of these plant roots through a sort of a synthetic means Banks explained how they studied aquatic plants that naturally attract microplastics but die in the process so they developed this model that has the same effect we landed on a proprietary silicone that we've developed in our lab that is slightly porous very hydrophobic and slow to biofoul so you can keep this in the water for around 2 weeks before it really starts to build up any algae or significant uh like Wildlife formation on it um but it also sticks really strongly to microplastic so we consider it to be an ideal uh material for us to go forward with Banks and Lu reached out to more than 100 organizations with their prototype the only one to give them a chance to move forward was the ACUA which has a water treatment plan on the site of the state's first commercial wind farm and solar canopy proof says president Matt DeNafo that they're consistently forward thinking they agreed to a one-year pilot for Banks and Lu to test their design and gather data this is the new contaminant that we're concerned about you know this is something that you know when we were worried about getting sick from raw Wastewater that's a thing of the past the new thing is is is these Plastics that we're ingesting that everybody in this room or this tent and outside have microplastics in your blood in fact they're found in our hearts our livers brain tissue even breast milk says Banks many of the additives in side Plastics are endocrine disruptors or carcinogenics so to make the pilot program possible PolyGone secured $1.9 million through a national sea Grant and $370,000 in funding through the New Jersey Commission on science Innovation and technology or csit with funds coming from the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities the success of this pilot could have far-reaching implications for how we address plastic waste on a global scale once you got the microplastics on it you can actually shake them off remove them and then reuse the filters the filters are cleaned once a week using simple dish detergent the Dual filter system allows one set to be working while the other is being cleaned for cleaning it it's a very simple straightforward process and it only needs to be shaken around for around 2 3 minutes for it to really extract the vast majority of microplastics that I've here the microplastics are then gathered and sent to a company that chemically changes their form from a polymer to a keratein that can be used in Pharmaceuticals the silicone filter is also recyclable what are the ideal spaces uh that you can set up this system in yeah that that's a very good question so at the moment as you can see this is a wide open Channel a lot of treatment facilities do not have open channels so many of them are inside fully closed pipe systems and that would not be ideal for this current iteration of the system but I do believe that the silicone acid using fiber can be applied within a pipe system PolyGone plans to use this year at ACUA to refine their materials their process and the ways in which they can implement this system across a number of different water treatment facilities in Atlantic City I'm Joanna Gagis NJ spotlight news [Music]