While other teens are scrolling TikTok, Virginia teen Mia Heller dedicated her time to inventing a water filter that can help reduce microplastics, after learning how they can contaminate drinking water.
Mia’s family initially invested in an at-home filtration system, but when she saw her mom having to replace the system’s thin membrane filter, the 18-year-old decided to design her own filter without the use of membranes.
She built a prototype in her garage using a magnetic liquid called ferrofluid, which attaches to the microplastics before they’re pulled out of the water with a magnet. After testing, Mia found her system successfully removed roughly 95.5% of microplastics.
“The result is an affordable, low-waste filtration system without the use of a solid membrane,” Mia told Smithsonian Magazine.
The teen noted that ferrofluid is expensive to produce at a large scale, so her system is more for ‘individual home use’, but she’s hopeful she could eventually take it to the market.
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