Around two billion people worldwide don't have access to clean and safe drinking water.
The unique thing that we're doing is taking spent coffee grounds that I brewed at home and brought to work, and we're coating them with magnetic nanoparticles,
The low cost and accessible solution can remove methylene blue, oil spills and microplastics from contaminated water.
Basireddy said, "It's important that we take materials that are accessible by people and make things that people can use."
"This could be deployed on a boat that has a small magnet at the end of it and the boat then moves through the water and the magnetic kind of tugs the coffee grounds along," Moran described.
The use of covered coffee grounds to clean water isn’t entirely new, but adding movement to the solution is.