At a lab in the Czech Republic, researchers are developing tiny robots that could help. The microscopic robots “are moving machines the size of a red blood cell,” says Martin Pumera, a chemistry professor and director of the Center for the Advanced Functional Nanorobots at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague. “They don’t have wheels or flippers or engines,” he says. Instead, they’re made of material that is propelled forward when exposed to sunlight. And when material comes into contact with microplastic, it rapidly speeds up the  degradation of plastic that happens naturally in the sun. As the tiny robots move through water—several millimeters per second, fast for their size—they can continue encountering more plastic and help decompose it.

The robots “can decompose the microplastic much faster than it will decompose itself,” Pumera says. For some types of plastic, such as polyethylene glycol, the technology can fully break down the material. It also breaks down plastics like polylactic acid or PLA, a bioplastic that is designed to degrade in industrial composting facilities but doesn’t easily break down in cold ocean water. The scientists are studying ways to design the devices to target different types of plastic, since microplastic comes in forms ranging from synthetic fibers to tiny particles of old tires.

In the past, Pumera collaborated with an environmental remediation company to design microrobots to clean up other contaminants in groundwater; the basic concept can be tweaked to use for different purposes. “We construct the robots like Lego,” he says. “We have different layers and different functionalities.” In the case of microplastic, for example, it’s important that the robot can move by itself, not just break down the plastic, so that it can break down as much plastic as possible….”