North Carolina State University researchers have developed a highly porous, superadhesive biopolymer mesh designed to capture microplastics across a broad range of particle sizes in both freshwater and saltwater. Inspired by naturally occurring mats and balls of tangled seaweed, the new material combines physical trapping with surface adhesion to capture particles ranging from millimeter-scale fragments down to tens of nanometers.

Researchers developed this material to address a longstanding challenge in microplastics removal. Existing approaches can effectively capture either larger particles or much smaller micro- and nanoscale particles, but efficiently removing both within a single process has proven difficult historically. To address this challenge, the NC State team has developed a multiscale structure capable of handling both.

“Our goal here was to develop a multiscale structure that allows us to capture the full range of plastic microparticles,” said Orlin Velev, corresponding author of the study and S. Frank and Doris Culberson Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State University.

NC State researcher holding seaweed-inspired biopolymer mesh for microplastics capture | Industrial Sustainability Monthly

An NC State researcher holds a sample of the superadhesive biopolymer mesh developed to capture microplastics across a broad range of particle sizes. (Photo credit: Adam Jennings, NC State University)

The resulting cleaners consist of porous meshes made from alginate and chitosan, biopolymers derived from seaweed and crustacean shells. The mesh surface is coated with fine chitosan fibers formed from soft dendritic colloids, or SDCs, which repeatedly branch into increasingly fine filaments and terminate in nanofiber structures. This architecture gives the material two complementary capture mechanisms. Larger microplastic particles can be physically trapped within the mesh openings, while the SDC-coated fibers capture micro- and nanoscale plastic particles through adhesion. The published study identifies van der Waals and electrostatic interactions as mechanisms supporting adsorption of the smaller particles.

“What you end up with looks like a fluffy net,” said Velev. “The ‘net’ part of the structure is a mesh capable of capturing the larger plastic microparticles – a millimeter or larger in size. Further, the individual strands of the net are ‘fluffy’ because they are coated with soft dendritic colloids, which are able to capture by adhesion even very small plastic microparticles – down to tens of nanometers in size.”

During proof-of-concept testing in both freshwater and saltwater environments, the researchers demonstrated the capture of laboratory-produced model nanoparticles and real-world microplastics across a broad range of particle sizes. The mesh is also made from sustainable, widely available materials. Once loaded with captured microplastics, researchers envision that the material could potentially be collected and reprocessed. One possible future approach could involve the use of microbial digestion to break down the captured plastics and mesh material for biosynthesis of additional biopolymer material.

“We’ve demonstrated that this design works,” said Velev. “And the materials we used are of natural origin and relatively inexpensive. So, it may present a viable path forward. Can it be used on a large scale? That depends on the extent to which we want to invest in scaling up such cleanup approaches.”

The research is detailed in the paper, “Artificial Neptune balls: Superadhesive biomimetic networks for broad size microplastics capture and removal,” published August 5, 2026, in Science Advances. Haeleen Hong, a recent Ph.D. graduate from NC State, is first author. The study was co-authored by Byeunggon Kim, Mesbah Ahmad and Velev and was supported by the National Science Foundation.

About North Carolina State University

North Carolina State University is a public land-grant research university based in Raleigh, North Carolina, with strengths across engineering, science, technology, agriculture, materials research and other applied research disciplines. Founded in 1887, NC State is a Research 1 institution with more than 40,000 students and more than 10,000 faculty and staff. Its research programs include materials science, environmental technologies, advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, data science and other areas addressing industrial and societal challenges. NC State received more than $500 million in new sponsored research awards during fiscal 2025. For more information, please click here.

North Carolina State University

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Molly Bakewell Chamberlin
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