CLEVELAND — In the waters of Lake Erie is a small, but abundant threat. Microplastics, plastic particles under 5 millimeters in size. A major source? Doing the laundry.

"Really that was our mission was, how do we stop the number one source of microplastic pollution?” said Max Pennington, the CEO and Co-Founder of CLEANR . “And we were honestly shocked that it happened to be our clothing and our washing machines."

Max Pennington and 2 other Case Western Reserve University classmates formed CLEANR, a start-up capturing microplastics from washing machine wastewater. The Sears Think[Box] provided the resources to test their ideas. After years of development, their filter is now on the market.

"It's really a challenging problem to capture microplastics from your laundry just because

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