WA-TER We Drinking

For this project, we chose to focus on the anchor “Clean Water and Health.” Our goal was to make sure the water was as filtered as possible with mostly natural and cost effective ingredients. This project was inspired by a calamity in Flint, Michigan. What had happened was their water was contaminated with heavy metals: copper, lead, nickel, iron, and zinc.  

We created 4 prototypes of 150 mL water samples during our trials. The “flint water” we were given to filter had high levels of water toxins: 0.5 chlorine, 0.6 pH, 50ppt hardness, 2mg/L copper, 150ppt iron, and 6.4 ammonia. The other toxins that we weren’t able to measure after filtering were zinc, lead, and nickel. Trial 1 had an 80% yield, or yielding 120 mL out of the 150. We had zero measurements of both chlorine and copper. The pH was a 6.4, the hardness was 250 ppt,  the iron was 25 ppt, and the ammonia levels were a 3. This process of water filtration took over 24 hours to filter to its full potential. Trial 1 was our best trial out of the 4. I believe this was our best one for many reasons, but one in particular played a role in our results: the depletion of resources as other groups went on with their other trials. In trial 1, in specific order from bottom to top, we put a coffee filter, half tbsp of activated carbon, which was not included in our other trials because it ran out, 1 scoop of dry sand, 20 units of crushed charcoal, 4 scoops of dry sand, a few rocks, a banana peel, and 6 more scoops of sand. For all of our trials, we kept the banana peel, sand, and charcoal in the filter as a constant. We figured out that the activated carbon was a factor that helped filter the water. 

The water properties that accounted for the action of filtering were cohesion when keeping the water molecules together so they could filter out equally. Another one is that water is a good solvent, meaning that while it dissolves such uses of filtration, the metals can stay in the devices, such as sand or charcoal, and the water without the metals should be able to pass through into the glass. Also, because water isn’t very dense, it is more likely to pass through the filtering resources. The very top of the filter of trial 1, the sand, is the first buffer to the metals. Water’s ability to be soluble is the reason why most water is retained. The banana peel is a harder thing for water to pass through without some stuff getting left behind. The charcoal and the activated carbon help with filtering because carbon helps. Activated carbon has a high heat capacity, so if the water were to be heat-treated, the carbon and charcoal would help avoid damage. Finally, the coffee filter is the last buffer between the metals and the nutrients. 

For the 6 C’s, I will be discussing cultural competence, collaborator,  and critical thinking. For “collaborator,” I maintained a positive attitude when the trial ran good and when the trial ran bad. For “critical thinking,” I, along with my group members, did well on figuring out an alternative when the resources ran out. For example, we had a very complex trial that ran well in numbers, but only got 66% yield. Cultural competence is important in this project because safe drinking water is a cultural issue, and should never be an issue for anyone. Clean drinking water is a natural human right, and should never be an issue, especially in Flint, Michigan, where they have access to some of the cleanest waters on our planet.