Irish teen won the Google Science Fair grand prize for his impressive invention of a method that removes up to 87% microplastics from water.
West Cork, Ireland – Fionn Ferreira has won the grand prize at the Google Science Fair for his innovative invention which extracts microplastics from water.
Every year, thousands of participants between the ages of 14 to 18 the competition. 18-year-old Fionn was one of the 24 international finalists before he got the fantastic news. His technique uses magnets and ferrofluids (a combination of oil and magnetite powder) which collect tiny bits of plastic from water samples.
Microplastics are a big problem in our waterways and oceans. There is no practical way to remove them, well, not until now. Most microplastics measure less than 5 millimetres in diameter, making it impossible to prevent them from ending up in oceans, lakes, and urban waterways using traditional filtration methods.
Fionn’s method can collect 87% of microplastics. He did over 1000 tests from his water samples and had great success.
Winning the Google Science Fair, Fionn had been awarded a prize of $50,000, which he plans to use to implement his technique at water plants to prevent microplastics from ending up in the ocean.