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Karl Schembri
When they look out of their classroom window, five inquisitive Form 1 students see dense black fumes coming out of the St Luke’s Hospital chimney.
Not much of an inspiration, one might say, and the students are fully aware of the environmental damage caused by the chimney smoke, coupled with exhaust from the cars driving along Sa Maison, making Tal-Pieta one of Malta’s most polluted towns. Two of the students suffer from asthma.
But inspired they are. Ambrose Galea, James Borg, Sander Grima, Gabriel Ellul and Neil Bugeja of St Augustine’s College have come up with an invention that reduces air pollution significantly: in this case car pollution. And it is this year’s winning project in the NSTF School Contest for Young Scientists.
They have baptised it the ‘Car Dust Grabber’ – an extension to the car silencer made of household materials, filled with expanded polystyrene that traps particulate matter emitted from the car.
“When we look around us, we realise we’re surrounded by pollution,” says Ambrose. “So we said we’d better do something to find a solution. You know, we have to reduce all this pollution.”
The students started taking the pollution problem seriously last October. Under the supervision of their science teacher, Dr Louise Grima, they started off by conducting a survey among their classmates to get to know how aware they were of the pollution problem. Later they conducted research into the causes of air pollution in Malta, grilling the authorities with some incisive questions and gathering official data from various sources.
“We collected so much information that we decided to concentrate only on the main cause: traffic pollution,” says Sander.
“We had already tried, unsuccessfully, to find a solution for chimneys, so we decided to attack car silencers,” says Gabriel.
Indeed, car transport is the largest source of air pollution in Malta. At present there are more than 266,000 vehicles on the road, and the number is steadily increasing.
In order to measure the extent of the problem, the students did not just rely on official data on air pollution. They went on the field with their home-made equipment to carry out their own experiments.
First they started collecting leaves from roadside trees, to test the relationship between traffic flow and dust falling on the leaves. They also left sticky paper on the roads to collect particulate matter, which they would then examine under the microscope.
From their results, it became clear that dust particles abound in the busiest roads, so the next question was: what is the effect of such pollution on health? To get an idea, they carried out a test. They put seeds in a dish that was systematically exposed to exhaust, and another dish of seeds was left in relatively clean air. The result was that the seeds left in exhaust grew much shorter than those in normal air. When the plants were removed from the dish to be measured, it was found that the roots of the plants that grew in the exhaust were tiny and broke very easily.
“We’re like the tiny plant,” says Ambrose, pointing at a photo of the two dishes, kept for documentation purposes in the report they compiled in painstaking detail for the young scientists’ contest. “We’d like to be like the bigger one, although even that must have been exposed to pollution. Malta is so small that everywhere is actually polluted.”
It was at that point when, faced with all the evidence of car pollution, they had a brainwave for a solution that would contribute to its reduction: the ‘Car Dust Grabber.’
“We came up with our own cheap way of reducing the black dust particles given off with car exhaust,” says Sander. “The idea was to build an easy-to-install extension to the car silencer to grab particulate matter before it is released into the atmosphere while the car is working.”
The results were quite impressive. After a five-minute drive, the polystyrene inside the silencer extension had already started turning black with the dust they had filtered.
“The reduction in particulate matter emitted by the car was significant,” Dr Grima said.
This was also confirmed by the young scientists’ contest jury, in front of whom the students had to defend their projects, answering some probing questions thrown their way by four expert judges.
“We are proud to say that if people use our CDG, the air we breathe will be cleaner and healthier,” Sander says.
Now they are looking forward to the summer holidays, when they will be presenting their invention in Marseilles, together with other young scientists from all over the Mediterranean.
But true to their critical minds, they also pose some difficult questions to themselves, as real scientists do.
“How long can each packet of polystyrene be used before it needs to be changed?” they ask themselves in their scientific report which puts professional consultants to shame. “Can the polystyrene be washed and used again? What happens to the dirty polystyrene? Can it be disposed safely?”
Which means that further tests will have to be carried out.
“This might be the start of another project for us in the future,” says James.
And with such committed young scientists around, the future does look a bit brighter.
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