Princeton Grads' Plant-Inspired Device Is Pulling Microplastics Out of Atlantic City Wastewater

Microplastics have officially been found everywhere from the deepest ocean trenches to the inside of human bodies, but a new machine on the Jersey shore is fighting back. Two Princeton alumni, Nathanial Banks and Yidian Liu, founded PolyGone Technologies to build a device that mimics hydrophobic plants: the kind that shed water on contact while attracting microplastic particles. Their prototype removed 98% of microplastics in lab tests, and now a two-year pilot is running at a wastewater plant in Atlantic City.

The wild part? No federal regulation required any of this. The Atlantic County Utilities Authority launched the program on its own, and the collected plastic particles can even be sent to recycling facilities for processing. Banks and Liu aren’t stopping at the plant level either. They want to scale the tech down for home use, so one day your own drain could catch plastic before it reaches the ocean.

It’s a story about young entrepreneurs, nature-inspired engineering, and a utility choosing to act before it had to. Microplastics aren’t going anywhere on their own, but this is a real step toward stopping them at the source. Would you install a home version of this device if it existed? Let us know in the comments.