Contest challenged participants to develop simple and inexpensive at-home tests to enable people to detect microplastics in their food
YONKERS, NY — Consumer Reports today announced the winners of its Microplastics Detection Challenge, a crowdsourced challenge to develop simple and inexpensive tests for detecting microplastics in food that people could perform at home without special training. Earlier this year, CR partnered with Lifeguard and invited experts from around the globe to develop tests that would enable people to measure their exposure to the tiny bits of plastic that are a growing public health and environmental concern.
Microplastics are plastic fragments smaller than 5 millimeters in size that are manufactured to be small for specific applications, such as microbeads in cosmetic products; or that break down from larger plastic items, such as plastic bottles and bags.
Microplastics are everywhere and can be found in the food we eat, the water we drink, the clothes we wear and the air we breathe. They can leach toxic chemicals and pose potential health risks on their own when ingested.
“The potential dangers of plastics accumulating in our bodies is still being investigated, from damage to reproductive health and incidence of cancer to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases,” said James E. Rogers, PhD, director, product and food safety research and testing at Consumer Reports. “But to better understand the health effects of microplastics, we’ve got to improve our ability to test for them so we can pinpoint where they are and in what concentrations. The solutions developed by the winners of the Challenge hold the promise of advancing testing efforts so that we can all have a better understanding of how we are exposed to microplastics in our daily lives.”
Unfortunately, microplastics are extremely hard to test for. The tests we do have are slow, expensive, and need to be done in a lab setting. What’s worse, they aren’t even always capable of recognizing the smallest particles, making it very difficult for us to learn more about the full extent of the problem, or how to make the changes we need to keep us safe.
The objective of the Microplastics Detection Challenge was to generate ideas for microplastic detection in food that could eventually be transformed into simple and inexpensive tests performed by people at home, including liquid foods. Consumer Reports received 72 submissions, which were evaluated by members of CR’s product testing and consumer impact teams and Scott Coffin and Dimitri Abrahamsson, outside experts in environmental toxicology and chemistry. The winners of the Challenge are:
First Place: Nur Allif Fathurrahman, Esraa Kotob Abas, and Listya Eka Anggraini for their low-cost, at-home test called “SPOT-MP” for detecting microplastics in food using a fluorescent spray. Their kit integrates curcumin (from turmeric) and silver nanoparticles, which, when activated by UV light, cause microplastics to fluroresce. The proposed kit aims to provide rapid, semi-quantitative results in under 15 minutes for less than $15 per test, addressing barriers of cost and complexity.
Runner Up (Feasibility): Himanshu Kashyap for MicroClear 95™, for a quick at-home test that detects microplastics in food within 15 minutes. To test for microplastics, the user simply mixes the food sample in a pouch with a liquid, which is then shaken. The sample is filtered and applied to a test strip that is read using a UV light or with a proprietary app. If microplastics are present, they will glow orange red – giving clear, easy-to-read results.
Runner Up (Most Innovative): S.U. Ahmed and S. H. Ahmed for a cost-effective biosensor for detecting microplastics using Electro Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS). This process measures changes in impedance across a surface when bacteria, acting as bioreceptors, interact with and degrade microplastics. This interaction releases ions, causing a detectable drop in impedance. A significant drop in impedance indicates the presence of microplastics
Honorable Mention: Pelmane Lenge Mulongo for a smartphone-compatible, fluorescence-based detector designed for at-home detection of microplastics in food. The kit uses Nite Red dye to highlight plastic particles, which are then detected by a smartphone camera with a magnified attachment and analyzed by a mobile app.