Alumnus Max Pennington (CWR ‘22), and fourth-year students David Dillman and Chip Miller were spurred to action by a simple fact: “94% of tap water in the United States contains microplastic fiber.”
“No one seemed to be doing anything effective at removing it,” said Pennington, who was a fourth-year student at the time he started the project. “So when we found out that clothing was the number one source of that microplastic fiber in tap water and into the environment and our bodies, we thought, ‘It has to be straight forward to filter out washing machine waste water’ and we came to think[box] and started creating prototypes.”
To tackle the issue, they co-founded a business with cutting-edge, patent-pending technology that could transform the way the world uses water: CLEANR.
The university’s makerspace, Sears think[box], was and still is an integral…
