Help Save Spongebob! Keep Our Water Safe!

I choose drinking water as my topic because every human and animal and sponge needs clean drinking water. 

Did you know? 65% of the human body is water. A person can only go 3 days without water 💀😬

Facts about water and water pollution

• 70% of the earth is covered by water but only 2.5% of that water is freshwater AND we can only get 1% of the freshwater because its under glaciers.  
• Lots of garbage (over 6 million pounds!!!!) ends up in the ocean every year. Most of it is plastic.
  
• 80% of water pollution is caused due to domestic sewage. Other causes are oil spills, fracking, agricultural runoff like pesticides. 
  
• Around 70% of industrial waste is dumped into the water. 
  
• Contaminated water can cause diseases like cholera and typhus

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle! 

My message is that we need to help stop polluting our drinking water by recycling, making companies get rid of their garbage in a safe way, don’t put your garbage like paint and oil down the drain, pick up litter, don’t waste water, use less plastic stuff, don’t litter, or waste energy. We can also look for new ways to filter water and help out like I did by using a banana to make dirty water cleaner… 

Bibliography:

“15 Interesting Facts about Water Pollution.” 15 Interesting Facts about Water Pollution, Veluda Water Filters, 21 Feb. 2017, www.veluda.com/en/blog/15-endiaferon-dedomena-gia-ti-molunsi-tou-nerou-220.
Cornell, Julia. “5 Tips to Keep Water Clean and Safe.” Medium, Medium, 22 Mar. 2019, medium.com/@h2olabcheck/5-tips-to-keep-water-clean-and-safe-ce779cce152e.

Denchak, Melissa. “Water Pollution: Everything You Need to Know.” NRDC, 13 Mar. 2020, www.nrdc.org/stories/water-pollution-everything-you-need-know.

Johnson, Jon. How Long You Can Live without Water. Medical News Today, 14 May 2019, www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/325174.

National Academies. “Safe Drinking Water Is Essential.” Koshland Science Museum, National Academies, 1 Sept. 2007, www.koshland-science-museum.org/water/new/en/Overview/index.html.

Nunez, Christina. “Freshwater 101: Pollution.” Water Pollution Facts and Information, 24 Jan. 2020, www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/freshwater/pollution/.

Philip, Agnel, et al. “63 Million Americans Exposed to Unsafe Drinking Water.” USA Today, Gannett Satellite Information Network, 15 Aug. 2017, www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/08/14/63-million-americans-exposed-unsafe-drinking-water/564278001/.

“Where This Occurs: Ground Water and Drinking Water.” EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, 15 Apr. 2019, www.epa.gov/nutrientpollution/where-occurs-ground-water-and-drinking-water.

Written by Camden

Microplastics

Microplastics, tiny bits of plastic, are really hard to remove from the ocean.  Most nets can’t catch them because the holes are too wide. Fish can swallow microplastics and when you eat the fish you can ingest plastic.  This is dangerous to humans because human bodies can’t break down the microplastics. Also, the microplastics are from plastic bottles that have deteriorated from the crashing waves and have been made into very small pieces that can harm sea life. 

Microplastics get into their digestive system and get into the fish from inside or the plastic can just stay in the fish until it is eaten or dies. You can NOT throw your bottles and garbage on the ground, instead, make sure it goes into recycling. You can go to your local beach and do a cleanup day and pick up the garbage and plastics so they don't get into the water. When you kayak or fish, you can pick up plastics you see in the water, so they don't become microplastics.

You can make a big change and talk to local leaders and vote to ban plastic bags because they usually just get thrown away or even are blown into the water and out to sea.


Microplastic
|
\ /

how Microplastic get in fish

|

\/

Written by Logan J

Oil Spills Are NOT Acceptable

Petroleum became a major industry following the oil discovery at Oil Creek Pennsylvania in 1859. Most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the US was the largest oil producing country in the world. The domestic petroleum industry that began in 1859 with a well drilled just 69.5 feet deep forever changed America’s economy, the standard of living, and culture. The earliest exploration companies began seeking oil for refining into a newly invented lamp fuel called kerosene. This “rock oil” fuel was cheaper than whale oil and far safer than the more popular but explosive fuel, camphene.

    Even though this discovery changed the way we did things back in the 19th and 20th century, an oil spill is extremely dangerous. And one in the Ocean is even worse. Elastec is an organization that designs solutions to clean massive oil spills like in this picture. This picture is of a crashed ship that spilled just over 400,000 gallons of Heavy Fuel Oil. As you can tell, that's a lot of oil and a lot of fire. But do you see how they are containing it? They are using a very large boom to contain the oil and bring it back to a containment center or to a ship that carries it to where it needs to be. 

 My team's solution is like this. The Interceptor 004 is an autonomous robot that collects plastic out of rivers with a boom like a guide to collect the plastic and put it in a bin. Our design is like this, but with a boom with foam blocks on the end instead of a plastic guide.

    The boom is made from hydrophobic oleophilic molecules attached to their rim which recover the surfaced oil and any oil that was missed. Oleophilic means that the molecules like to cling to the hydrocarbons in petroleum. And the hydrocarbons in petroleum are hydrophobic as well as the sponge, so you don’t have to worry about the water taking up any space in your foam boom. Then it returns the oil either to somewhere it can be resold or be contained for later use.

The black legos represent the oil, the long lego pieces represent the Booms, and the two tower looking pieces represent the large oil containers. I published this blog post during a school closure during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and didn't have the resources at home to create something robotic, but in my opinion, it came out pretty good for having only a couple of legos.

There are many things that you can do to help. There really isn't a way to prevent oil spills, most of them are accidents I hope, but the plastic waste problem is pretty big as well. One of my favorite and easiest to remember is the three R's. That's Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. Now, do you notice that Reduce and Reuse are both before Recycle? That means Reduce the non-reusable plastic and recycle when we can't reuse it. We really shouldn't be using that much non-reusable plastic. Most of the plastic in our houses are or should be containers of some kind.

Bibliography

Elastec.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_petroleum_industry_in_the_United_States

Written by Ethan

Have Dirty Water?

Hydro Dynamic Challenge

Intro

My class is working on cleaning the oceans, creeks, and rivers of plastic and garbage. Thanks to COVID 19 we have to stay at home so we do all our work while at home! By staying home I was able to find more research links for you to look at.

Idea

I thought of making an invention that can filter water and clean it up but you can't drink out of it. I got the idea from the invention of the LifeStraw because it has a filter that removes about 99.9999% bacteria and it also removes the chance of getting Guinea worm and Giardia. Here is a list of things that LifeStraw can filter: Poop water, toilet water, mud puddle, pond water, clear water, and spit water, things that Life Straw can't filter: Pee, Saltwater, Sprite, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Lemonade, Chocolate milk, and probably Slurpy juice. Sorry if I weird you out!

What I Will Make My Filter\Straw Out Of

I will use a lot of fuzzy pipe cleaners for a filter and a sheet of plastic to wrap around the filter. I will need to cut the pipe cleaners in half to make the filter bigger. In my estimate, I think it will filter at least 80.6% of the water.

This is a photo of my invention.

This is the FilterTube Version 0.1 This is a prototypeHere are the URL sources on where I found my information. I hope you enjoyed the blog!

https://youtu.be/Nk7J-lsZ2f0
https://youtu.be/_mkUTSGCF3I
https://youtu.be/A6bVCXdBuD0
https://youtu.be/NqZlq7m56yI
https://youtu.be/i82YD7uvi2s
https://youtu.be/0pnGCN1GP_U

Written by Anya