Three students from Universitas Airlangga just won an Indonesian essay competition with their idea for a device to clean up microplastic pollution in the ocean, Universitas Airlangga reported.
The 2025 FISIP Achievement Week Essay Competition was a national event organized by the Student Executive Board of the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at Universitas Negeri Semarang. It welcomed over 170 entries, of which the Universitas Airlangga team took first prize.
The young innovators responsible for the win are Mohammad Pradana Setyawan and Intan Rahayu from the Faculty of Vocational Studies, and Rava Adistya Hanum from the Faculty of Humanities. Combining their educational backgrounds, they considered a long list of practical and social issues to tackle, eventually settling on microplastic pollution.
"We considered a range of ideas — from mental health to agriculture — before deciding on the microplastics issue due to its high urgency and lack of tangible technological solutions," Hanum said, per Universitas Airlangga.
To address the problem, the team conceived of a device remotely controlled and monitored via the Internet of Things, with no need to check its progress in person. It would use suction and filtration to remove debris from ocean water, have sensors to distinguish plastics from organic material, and use an enzyme spray to break down microplastics while protecting ocean pH levels and microbe ecosystems.
"What makes our device stand out is its multifaceted capability — it can suction, filter, and distinguish between organic and inorganic waste," said Rahayu, per Universitas Airlangga.
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That's an incredibly active approach for removing one of the most pervasive forms of pollution in the world today. There are 170 trillion pieces of plastic in the ocean — most of them microplastics — and the infiltration of this material into drinking water and fish used for food has dire implications for human health, not to mention the health of an ecosystem we rely on for a huge portion of our economy and food supply.
Having won the competition with the initial design, the team is moving on to the prototyping stage. As of late May, they were in discussions with the Surabaya Environmental Agency and UNAIR's Electrical Vehicle On Study team.
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