This article was first published in the October 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Chemist Abby Knight has found a shiny new way to filter chromium out of groundwater.
Our waterways are teeming with plastic waste. Some five trillion bits now clog the world's oceans, ending up in everything from deep-sea sediments to plankton guts. Nobody wants this - except chemist Abby Knight, that is. In fact, she's adding more.
Since 2011, the 26-year-old post-doc, now at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been building a vast library of plastic microbeads -- each the size of a grain of sand -- with a range of special powers. One is the ability to pull hexavalent chromium out of groundwater.
Chromium is nasty. In high enough doses, the industrial byproduct can cause cancer. "Currently we attempt to solve it by saying, 'Don't drink this water and eventually it will diffuse,'" Knight says. But her beads offer a solution. They're coated in peptoids, a class of synthetic molecule she has tweaked to target chromium. When Knight dumps the beads into water, the peptoids' "arms" grab on to the toxic metal, clearing up the contamination.
Of course, some of us don't want to hear that water needs more plastic, and researchers still need to find a way to scoop out these microbeads (along with the ones that originated in your face wash). But with a pinch of chemistry, Knight has turned a filthy pollutant into a potent purifier -- a Brita filter for the planet.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
