University lab gets big donation in fight against growing threat to water supply: 'We saw an opportunity to bridge that gap'

A couple's generous donation will help support further microplastic research at an Ohio university.

Four hundred million tons of plastic are produced each year, and a majority of it will add to the billions of tons of plastic already sitting in landfills.

Plastic is not biodegradable and will never fully decompose. Instead, as plastic breaks apart, it becomes microplastics — tiny plastic particles measuring less than 5 millimeters in size. Because of their size, microplastics are difficult to detect and remove.

They are increasingly found in the air, water, and soil. Microplastics also accumulate in the human body and have been linked to a number of troubling health issues.

Researchers have been trying to find effective ways to remove microplastics from water for years — boiling, magnets, foams, and even egg whites. Unfortunately, not all research receives adequate funding, so Tom and Nancy Seitz decided to change that.

The Seitzes donated $1 million to help researcher Ica Manas-Zloczower and others at Case Western Reserve University develop new ways of breaking down microplastics.

Manas-Zloczower and a team of researchers recently developed a process called "vitrimerization," which "manipulates thermosets at a molecular level to enable reprocessing and recycling," according to Case Western Reserve University's The Daily.

This isn't the first time the Seitzes have supported Case Western Reserve. They also donated $1 million to improve the university's engineering building in 2023.

"Sometimes you have really promising technology that gets stuck because it's not yet commercial enough to attract industry funding or exciting enough from an academic point of view to attract institutional funding," Tom Seitz said, per The Daily. "We saw an opportunity to bridge that gap."

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Manas-Zloczower expressed her gratitude for the Seitzes' donation.

"Their gift will provide critical support for advancing the formulations, processing approaches and talent pipeline to make a meaningful impact in this field of research," Manas-Zloczower told The Daily.

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