Wastewater treatment plants are important point sources of microplastics and micropollutants into the environment. Many wastewater treatment plants will be required to upgrade their facilities with an advanced treatment step to remove micropollutants, but these processes do not target microplastic removal. We therefore investigated the ability of two advanced treatment methods and our novel Wasser 3.0 PE-X® process to remove microplastics at the wastewater treatment plant in Landau, Germany. Read more about the key finding of our study, which was recently published open access in MDPI Water.

Thanks to the generous support of the Vector Foundation, we were able to start our new research project to develop a rapid test for microplastic detection in water bodies at the beginning of November. Simpler, faster and cheaper is again our motto. Because our application-oriented research has only one goal: impact.

Our holistic strategy for dealing with microplastics and micropollutants such as pharmaceuticals, pesticides, PFAS and heavy metals in water is called detect | remove | reuse. In this article, we describe what lies behind it and the extent to which it opens up new ways for water treatment.