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Adsorption of plastics by static electricity for the purpose of collecting microplastics on beaches
Summary
Researchers developed a microplastic collector that uses electrostatic adsorption via a Van de Graaff generator to attract negatively charged microplastics from beach sand using Coulomb force. Laboratory experiments validated the device's ability to separate micrometer-scale plastic particles from sand, proposing static electricity as a practical new method for marine beach microplastic collection.
The objective of this study is to develop a microplastic collector for marine environmental conservation. Microplastics with a size of a few micrometers, which are produced by the fragmentation of plastic products discharged into the ocean, easily accumulate in the ecosystem. The device to be developed is designed to collect negatively charged microplastics by adsorbing them with Coulomb force. Based on the Van de Graaff electromotive force generator, this could be a new method to collect microplastics contained in beach sand by separating them from the sand. In this paper, experiments on the collection of microplastics by static electricity and the design of a collection device are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of this method.