RE: Competition?6 Oct 2025 07:48
Full article here - correction - they raised 15mn, not valued 15mln!
When Adam Root started his company on his mother-in-law’s dining table in Essex, he never dreamt he would be on the verge of winning one of Prince William’s £1 million prizes just eight years later. He began with a dream of stopping microplastics being pumped into the water every time we put on a load of washing — and his filtration technology has just been adopted by the major manufacturer Bosch. Since July, the filter unit has been on sale for £199 in a neat washing-machine-top unit, which is no bigger than a shoe box and can be used with any brand of appliance.
His company, Matter, which is based in Bristol, was on Saturday revealed by the Prince of Wales as one of 15 finalists in the world’s most prestigious environmental award, the Earthshot Prize. Root, now 35, said it was “unbelievable” to be selected. “It’s just wild,” he said. “You can’t apply, you have to be nominated. In 2017 it was just me; now we’ve grown to 45 people having global impact across a number of regions and we’ve raised £15 million.”
He added: “Microplastic is one of the most pervasive pollution sources on the planet. People don’t want microplastic in the water, they don’t want it in their food and they don’t want it in their bodies.” Yet with every load of laundry we put on, 700,000 microplastic fibres are flushed out of our washing machine into the drainage system. Eventually it makes its way into rivers and into the ocean. “Last year there were 171 trillion particles of plastic in our ocean,” Root said.
A keen scuba diver, he decided in his mid-twenties to use his engineering skills to tackle water pollution. Now father to a 16-month-old little girl, and with another baby on the way, he said: “When I spend time with my daughter I realise what we’re trying to build the future for. It’s a reason to get out of bed. We have to get on and make this happen. We don’t have a choice."
In July, the Matter filtration technology went on sale, made by Bosch and its sister company, Siemens. The water outlet tube is connected into the filter unit and a second tube connected to the drainage system. The unit filters 97 per cent of microplastics out of the water and the resulting plasticky fluff — similar to the lint removed from tumble dryers — has to be removed every six washes. At the moment, this is then thrown into the bin, to be taken to landfill or incineration, but in time Root hopes to set up a collection system for this to be recycled into new products.
Root, who studied mechanical engineering at university and then worked for Dyson and General Electric before setting up on his own, is also in talks with companies to integrate the filtration system into washing machines themselves. At some point, he believes, legislation will be passed to compel manufacturers to reduce the microplastics they pump into the sewage system.
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