Credit: Adapted from ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces
Small pieces of plastic are everywhere, stretching from urban environments to pristine wilderness. Left to their own devices, it can take many years for them to degrade completely. Catalysts activated by sunlight could speed up the method , but getting these compounds to interact with microplastics is difficult. In a proof-of-concept study, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces developed self-propelled microrobots which might swim, attach to plastics & break them down.
While plastic products are omnipresent indoors, plastic waste and broken bits now litter the outside, too. the small-est of those — microplastics but 5 mm in size — are hard to select up and take away. Additionally , they might adsorb heavy metals and pollutants, potentially harming humans or animals if accidently consumed. So, previous researchers proposed a low-energy thanks to get rid-of plastics within the environment by using catalysts that use sunlight to-produce highly reactive compounds that break down these sorts of polymers. However, getting the catalysts and tiny plastic pieces in touch with one another is challenging and typically requires pretreatments or bulky mechanical stirrers, which aren’t easily scaled-up. Martin Pumera and colleagues wanted to [create] a sunlight-propelled catalyst that moves toward and latches onto microparticles and dismantles them.
To transform a catalytic material into light-driven microrobots, the researchers made star-shaped particles of bismuth vanadate then evenly coated the 4-8 μm-wide structures with magnetic iron oxide. The microrobots could swim down a maze of channels and interact with microplastic pieces along their entire lengths. The researchers found that under light, microrobots strongly glommed on to 4 common sorts of plastics. The team then illuminated pieces of the four plastics covered with the microrobot catalyst for seven days in dilute peroxide solution. They observed that the plastic lost 3% of its weight which the surface texture for all kinds changed from smooth to pitted, and small molecules & components of the plastics were found within the left-over solution. The researchers say the self-propelled microrobot catalysts pave the way toward systems which will capture and degrade microplastics in hard-to-reach-locations.
The findings were reported on ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
