It isn't chemistry that removes microplastics from water — it's pore size.
Reverse osmosis (RO) removes microplastics and nanoplastics through simple size exclusion, not chemical reaction. A thin-film composite RO membrane has an effective pore size of roughly 0.0001 microns — about 0.1 nanometers. The smallest microplastics, at around 1 micron, are still about 10,000 times larger than that pore. Even nanoplastics at the smaller end of the reported range (~100 nm) are roughly 1,000 times larger than what can physically pass through an intact membrane [1].
Research testing has reported RO removing roughly 99.9% of microplastics and nanoplastics from tap water, making it — as of current research — the only household-scale water treatment technology confirmed capable of removing nanoplastics down to sub-100-nanometer sizes, rather than just larger microplastic fragments [1].
This is the specific engineering reason MPFREE's agricultural and facility audits specify a filtration pore-size threshold (< 0.1 µm nominal) rather than a vaguer "appropriate filtration" requirement: at that pore size, the physics of exclusion — not the treatment method's marketing description — is what actually determines whether microplastics pass through.