To Design a Microplastics Filter, This Company Copied Nature

BY JOSH SUKOFF @JOSHSUKOFF

Jun 10, 2025

You can’t see or feel them. But they’re in your food, your water, your blood—and even, according to a 2025 study, your brain. Microplastics are everywhere, and your laundry is one of the largest sources, according to a 2024 global modeling study in the Journal of Hazardous Materials. 

Studies detail how everyday loads of laundry, especially those filled with synthetic fabrics like nylon and polyester, shed up to 700,000 microplastic fibers per wash. Most washing machines lack a mechanism that can catch these microscopic particles, so they flow straight into wastewater systems. From there, they break down even further and infiltrate everything from marine life to drinking water to human arteries, according to multiple peer-reviewed studies.

A Cleveland-based startup called CLEANR thinks it’s got a fix. The company’s VORTX filter, launched commercially on June 3, is designed to capture over 90 percent of synthetic microfibers before they leave the washing machine—a claim validated by independent testing from the nonprofit Shaw Institute, a Maine-based environmental research lab.

CLEANR was founded in 2022 by Case Western Reserve grads Max Pennington, Chip Miller and David Dillman. Pennington, now CEO, first encountered the microplastics issue during his internship at Procter & Gamble, where he worked on life cycle assessments, calculating the environmental impact of a product from manufacturing to disposal.

“I was really shocked to learn that our clothing and our washing machines, as we do our laundry, is actually the number one source of microplastic pollution,” he said. A 2024 peer reviewed study published in Journal of Hazardous Materials supports that perspective, labelling microplastic fibers from household laundry as significant contaminants. 

The team built its first prototypes in the University’s seven-story innovation hub. But early tests conducted on Pennington’s own washing machine led to a flooded apartment and a clogged appliance.

“We very quickly realized that we were going to need to come up with something new to really filter down to the level that we wanted to without impacting the washing machine at all,” Pennington said. “And that was when we turned to nature.”

Manta rays and basking sharks create a natural vortex as they swim, which prevents their gills from clogging with debris. CLEANR’s engineers mimicked that flow in their patent-pending VORTX technology. It’s a spiral device that spins wastewater and the suspended synthetic fibers into a disposable pod, avoiding clogging.

Testing by the Shaw Institute confirmed the design removes over 90 percent of microplastics down to 50 microns in size—about half the width of a human hair. That puts CLEANR’s filter in line with Europe’s strictest proposed regulations, including France’s 2025 Circular Economy Law mandate that requires microplastic filters in all new washing machines.

The company has already piloted units at Case Western Reserve University, University of Akron, and University of South Alabama in student residence halls. CLEANR estimates that 100 filters installed on campus washers can prevent more than 5,600 credit cards’ worth of plastic from entering waterways annually. 

That comparison metric stems from a 2019 World Wildlife Fund report, based on a University of Newcastle study. While the figure helped draw attention to the scale of human microplastic ingestion, some scientists have since scrutinized the claim that humans could ingest one credit card worth of microplastics weekly.