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Founder Adam Root in Rio in bid for Earthshot prize for tackling microplastics problem

Hello Rainmakers,

Adam Root, a former engineer with household appliance firm Dyson launched his company Matter to look at how he could harness his skills to protect the oceans from microfibres.

His fundraising journey has been wild, as Rob Buckland explains.

We’re used to dealing with big numbers here at Rainmakers, so here’s a couple to ponder over as world leaders gather in Brazil for the latest COP global climate change conference.

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Each time you use your washing machine it releases, on average, 700,000 microfibres into the wastewater system. That’s each time.

This is because modern clothing materials, such as polyester, nylon, acrylic and polyamide, tend to contain plastics. Lots of them.

And sooner or later they’ll likely to end up in the world’s oceans. Add that to the microfibres released by large-scale textile manufacturing across the globe and there is something like 171trillion of them floating around.

Scientists reckon microplastic pollution is one of the fastest-growing threats to the planet because it disrupts the ocean’s blue carbon pump - a vital system that generates more than 50% of the world’s oxygen and captures around 40% of global carbon.

If that wasn’t alarming enough, research now shows that microplastics are infiltrating the human body, with links to serious health risks, including reduced fertility and heart blockages.

Adam Root, a former engineer with household appliance firm Dyson, was shocked when he came across these findings. As a keen scuba diver, he knew about pollution in the oceans - but the sheer scale of the problem stirred him into action.

In 2017 he launched a company called Matter to look at how he could harness his skills to engineer a solution that would stop them reaching the ocean in the first place, recycling them instead.