Photo: Society for Science / ISEF 2024
The problem starts in a laundry machine. Every time a synthetic fabric — a fleece jacket, a polyester shirt, a pair of yoga pants — goes through a wash cycle, it sheds microscopic plastic fibers. Those fibers pass through wastewater treatment systems that were not designed to catch particles measured in micrometers, enter rivers and oceans, accumulate in the tissues of fish, and eventually appear in the bloodstreams of the humans who eat those fish. By the time Justin Huang and Victoria Ou began their project, microplastic contamination had been found in human lungs, placentas, and blood. The scale of the problem was staggering. The existing solutions were inadequate. They decided to build a better one.
Huang and Ou were classmates at The Woodlands College Park High School in Texas — a school in the suburbs north of Houston that had produced science competition finalists before, but nothing quite like what these two would build. They were 17. They had access to a school laboratory, some equipment, and a shared conviction that ultrasonic technology — which had been used in industrial cleaning and medical imaging — might be redirectable toward water filtration. The concept was elegant: high-frequency sound waves create forces that push particles to one side of a flowing liquid. If the particles are microplastics and the liquid is water, you can separate them.
The engineering challenge was translating that concept into a functioning prototype. The duo spent months calibrating the frequency, the flow rate, and the geometry of their device — the angle at which water entered the channel, the placement of the ultrasonic transducers, the mechanism for collecting the plastic-concentrated stream. When they tested it in the lab, the results were better than they had dared to project: a single pass through the device removed between 84 and 94 percent of the suspended microplastic particles. The clean water flowed out one side. The contaminated fraction, concentrated and separable, flowed out the other.
They brought their prototype to the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair in May 2024 — the largest pre-college science competition in the world, drawing nearly 2,000 finalists from more than 60 countries, each of whom had already won a regional competition to qualify. The judges at ISEF include working scientists and engineers from major research institutions. They are experienced at distinguishing genuine innovation from well-packaged incremental work. What Huang and Ou presented was the former.
The Gordon E. Moore Award for Positive Outcomes for Future Generations is ISEF's most prestigious individual prize — $50,000, named for the Intel co-founder and environmental philanthropist. It is awarded to projects whose implications extend beyond the competition floor and into the real problems facing the planet. In 2024, the judges gave it to Huang and Ou. The citation recognized both the technical achievement — a filtration efficiency that rivals industrial systems built with far greater resources — and the potential applications: wastewater treatment plants, textile factories, laundry machines, rural water sources in communities that cannot afford conventional filtration infrastructure.
"35 percent of primary microplastic pollution comes from synthetic textiles you wash out with your clothes," Huang noted after the award. The stat points to the scope of what he and Ou had decided to take on — not a marginal problem but one of the central sources of a global environmental crisis. Their prototype is small. Their ambition is not. They have spoken publicly about scaling the device for use in industrial settings and eventually as a consumer product that could attach directly to household washing machines.
Justin Huang and Victoria Ou are, as of 2025, still in their teens — recent high school graduates planning their university paths. The device they built in a Texas high school laboratory has already been featured in national media, cited by environmental researchers, and discussed by engineers at organizations working on water quality. The work is not finished. But the starting point — 84 to 94 percent microplastic removal, built by two seventeen-year-olds, powered by sound — is one of the most striking opening moves in recent environmental science.
"35 percent of primary microplastic pollution comes from synthetic textiles that you wash out with your clothes."— Justin Huang, post-ISEF interview, May 2024
Fast Facts
Milestone Timeline
"Their device filters microplastics using ultrasound — in lab tests, the acoustic force from high-frequency sound waves removed between 84% and 94% of the suspended microplastic particles in a single pass."— Society for Science press release, May 17, 2024
Watch & Learn
Justin Huang and Victoria Ou explain their ultrasonic microplastics filtration device — the science behind acoustic separation and how two high school students built it in a Texas lab.
Regeneron ISEF 2024 — behind the scenes at the world's largest pre-college science fair, where Huang and Ou's invention earned the top environmental award and $50,000.
In Context: Microplastics Filtration Technologies
| Technology | Method | Removal Rate | Scale / Limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Huang & Ou device | Ultrasonic acoustic separation | 84–94% | Prototype — scalable, no chemicals |
| Membrane filtration | Physical pore barriers | Up to 99% (particles >1µm) | Expensive, clogs, requires pressure |
| Coagulation-flocculation | Chemical aggregation | 70–80% | Chemical additives, sludge disposal |
| Conventional wastewater treatment | Settling + sand filtration | 40–70% | Standard plants — not designed for microplastics |
| Washing machine filters (e.g. Cora Ball) | Mechanical fiber capture | ~26% of microfibers | Consumer product, limited efficacy |
Why This Matters
Microplastics have been found in human blood, lungs, placentas, and breast milk. They have been detected in the deepest ocean trenches and the highest mountain glaciers. The global production of plastics shows no sign of slowing, which means the contamination load in water systems will increase for decades regardless of what recycling policies are adopted. The question is not whether to address the problem but how. What Justin Huang and Victoria Ou built — a chemical-free, acoustically powered separation device that achieves 84 to 94 percent removal in a single pass — is the kind of elegant solution that looks obvious in retrospect but required genuine engineering insight to produce. That they built it at 17, in a high school laboratory, using a grant of resources no research university would consider significant, is the detail that changes what other seventeen-year-olds believe is possible for themselves.