April 1, 2025

Ares Nguyen

11th Grade

Fountain Valley High School

Microplastics have been an issue for centuries. They affect many things, such as wildlife, nature, and even our own food. The issue comes when we find a way to stop the growth of microplastics throughout the world. The ratio of issues to solutions just keeps increasing day by day, but engineering is something that we can do to figure out a way to stop or at least prevent microplastics from taking over.

Microplastics have become prevalent throughout the years and have become major issues. These microplastics can cause disease and maybe even induce health hazards, such as cancer. These microplastics are able to go through oral, nasal, and dermal routes of the body and build up in specific organs. This build-up can trigger uncontrolled cell proliferation and result in tissue growth of the organ, which may lead to various cancers that can affect blood, lungs, etc. In addition to this contamination, it may lead to induced toxicity and tumorigenesis in both humans and animals. These diseases have been analyzed and proven to be extremely toxic to the body.

Now, how can we fix this? Many studies have shown that almost fourteen million tons of plastic pollute the world annually, which then is broken down in the environment and turns into microplastics. This negatively impacts marine ecosystems and human health tremendously. Reducing microplastics has been a problem that scientists around the world have attempted to fix for centuries, and there are several strategies, mainly consisting of methods of preventing them from going into wastewater, to stop and prevent this. One method is a filter that collects microfibers from many sources, such as washing machines. This assists with synthetic clothing, which excretes many microplastics when washed. This will help prevent many microplastics from being put out into the environment.

Another step put forward to preventing and stopping microplastics is placing filters in storm and wastewater drains, which are able to catch the microplastics as well as larger forms of plastics. There have also been recent developments of mechanical technologies that take plastics out of water bodies as a removal technique. This form of removal would be extremely beneficial, as the filters would only prevent the microplastics from entering water bodies, but having a piece of technology that is able to remove microplastics from water would be very important. Another unique solution is the development of bioplastics. These are engineered to be biodegradable, meaning that if more companies can switch to the use of these biodegradable plastics, they would be much more sustainable to the environment and be able to decompose easier.

As the years pass by, microplastics become more and more of an issue. However, these developments in engineering throughout the past few decades immensely support our cause of stopping these microplastics from entering the marine ecosystem and our own food and bodies. Throughout our time in this world, we just keep developing better inventions and ideas every day to support the cause of keeping our environment clean.