The story
- Scientists at São Paulo State University (UNESP) and the University of Birmingham found that extracts from moringa tree seeds remove up to 98.5% of microplastics from drinking water — performing as well as or better than aluminum sulfate, the chemical widely used in treatment plants today.
- The moringa tree, often called the "miracle tree," has been used as a water purification agent since ancient times — by Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans — but this is the first study to rigorously test its effectiveness against microplastics specifically.
- The team tested microplastics with a mean size of 18.8 micrometers (roughly a quarter the thickness of a human hair) and found moringa seed extract outperformed the chemical alternative in more alkaline water conditions.
- Moringa has significant practical advantages: the tree is renewable, drought-resistant, biodegradable, produces less sludge than aluminum-based treatments, and carries fewer toxicity concerns.
- "We showed that the saline extract from the seeds performs similarly to aluminum sulfate," said lead author Gabrielle Batista. "In more alkaline waters, it performed even better than the chemical product."
- Researchers caution that more work is needed to test the method on different types of microplastics and determine how scalable the approach could be at a city-wide level.
- The findings were published in the journal ACS Omega and have drawn particular interest from communities in the Global South, where moringa already grows widely and chemical treatment infrastructure is limited.
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These findings contribute essential data to the emerging field of sustainable water treatment technologies.
— Gabrielle Batista, São Paulo State University
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