WATER PURIFIER THE SECRET TO ENVIRONMENTAL CLEANUP: MORE PLASTIC

摘要

Our waterways are teeming with plastic trash. Some 5 trillion bits now clog the world's oceans, ending up in everything from deep-sea sediments to plankton guts. Nobody wants that garbage in there. Except chemist Abby Knight, that is: She's adding more. Since 2011, the 26-year-old post-doc, now at UC 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.