Plastics are ubiquitous. Automobiles, shopping bags, beauty products, clothing, drinking straws, computers, packing material, tools and toys all contain plastic. When we discard, clean and manufacture these items, we generate microplastics. 

Microplastics are fragments of any type of plastic less than 5 mm in length, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the European Chemicals Agency. They exist as beads, resin, fibers and fragments. “Microbeads” are small particles used in personal care products and the pellets used to produce plastic goods (Gregory 1996, Fendall and Sewell 2009, Cole et al. 2011). “Fragments” result from the breakdown of larger plastics, and “fibers” can slough off of synthetic textiles as we launder them. These small particles can pass through a typical wastewater treatment plant and end up in our oceans, rivers and lakes (Fendall and Sewell 2009, Browne et al. 2011). 

Filtering microplastics from industrial wastewater prior to discharge is one way to effectively to reduce the volume of this waste material from entering our surface water. Industrial customers can rely on Aqua-Aerobic pile cloth media filters to filter these harmful microplastics, while offering simple operation, small footprint and high forward flow to backwash ratio. The family of pile cloth media filters, available in several configurations including Aqua MiniDisk, AquaDisk, Aqua MegaDisk and others, features OptiFiber media capable of producing consistent effluent water quality. 

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