Most efforts to fight plastic pollution try to use less of it. An 18-year-old student from Ireland has taken a different route, designing a plastic built to help clean up the mess plastics already make. Arya Satheesh, of Letterkenny in County Donegal, was named the European regional winner of The Earth Prize 2026 for Eco Purge, a plant-based biodegradable plastic engineered to break down safely while releasing enzymes that attack microplastics in the surrounding environment. The award places her among seven regional winners chosen from roughly 4,000 entrants in what organizers call the world’s largest environmental competition for teenagers.
A Plastic Designed To Clean Up After Itself
The idea behind Eco Purge is to make a single material do two jobs at once. Conventional plastics linger for decades and fragment into microplastics, the tiny particles now found in oceans, soil, food and drinking water. Satheesh’s material is built to biodegrade rather than fragment, and as it breaks down it releases catalysts that help degrade other microplastic particles nearby.
The mechanism rests on enzymes embedded inside the plant-based plastic as it is formed. While the product is in use, the enzymes stay stable and inert. As the material degrades, they are gradually released and continue working in different settings, including water, soil and compost. The full project title, Eco Purge: Biodegradable Plastic with Enzyme-Driven Microplastic Degradation, captures the approach: the plastic is meant to replace some everyday plastic and to act on plastic waste already spread through the environment.
From A Water-Quality Project To A Working Prototype
The concept grew out of an earlier piece of research. While monitoring water quality, Satheesh found that microplastics were relatively easy to detect but far harder to remove, a gap that defines much of the field. Detection tools have advanced quickly; practical removal at scale has not.
Rather than stop at measuring the problem, she set out to address it, studying how plastics break down and developing a plant-based material that could carry the enzymes needed to do the work. The project moved beyond theory into a working prototype with help from established laboratories. Satheesh collaborated with researchers at University College Dublin and Atlantic Technological University in Letterkenny, as well as the BiOrbic Bioeconomy Research Centre, while still in school. That access to university-level research environments allowed an idea conceived by a teenager to be tested with scientific rigor.
Why The Dual Approach Stands Out
The reason the project drew attention is its angle on the problem. Most plastic solutions are subtractive: use less, ban single-use items, or substitute compostable materials for conventional ones. Those approaches slow the inflow of new plastic but do little about the microplastics already in circulation, which is the harder and more persistent half of the crisis.
Eco Purge tries to address both ends. As a biodegradable substitute, it reduces the plastic being added; as a carrier of microplastic-degrading enzymes, it works on contamination already present. Whether that dual function holds up outside the lab is the open question, and the kind of claim that requires extensive testing across real-world conditions before it can be trusted at scale. But the framing, treating the plastic itself as a tool against pollution rather than only a source of it, is what set the entry apart in a competition built to reward practical environmental thinking.
What Comes Next For Eco Purge
The Earth Prize awards each of its seven regional winners $12,500 in funding, along with mentorship and resources, drawn from a total pool of $100,000. Satheesh plans to put her share toward developing the material further, with an eye on real-world applications such as packaging and compost bags, where a plastic that both decomposes and helps clean up microplastics could have the clearest early use.
The scientific road ahead is substantial. A regional prize and a functioning prototype are early milestones, not proof of a deployable product, and scaling a lab material into something manufacturable, affordable and effective in open environments is where many promising green technologies stall. Satheesh has framed the win as a starting point rather than a finish line, saying she hopes Eco Purge can “become a scalable solution that makes a real difference.”
What the recognition demonstrates, beyond any single material, is that the microplastics problem is drawing fresh thinking from outside the usual circles. The competition that honored her, open to students aged 13 to 19, exists partly to surface exactly this kind of work: young researchers willing to take on a problem established industries have struggled to solve, and to do it by rethinking what a piece of plastic is supposed to do.
