The Battle of the Water Filters: Environmental Justice AND Microbiology

 

Tested Studies in Laboratory Teaching, 2018, Volume 39

Kathleen A. Nolan & Alison Dell

Abstract

As part of our general biology course that includes a lab, students are required to partake in a group research project that results in a lab report and a poster. An intriguing and successful project was to have a "contest" to see which water filters worked the best. The students learned about Rita Colwell's experiment of decreasing cholera infection rates in Bangladesh by using sari cloth to filter the local drinking water. (She recorded a decrease of cholera by 48% in those who used the sari cloth.) Our students tested cotton cloth (T-shirt), denim, and a LifeStraw to filter water from the East River in the Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York City. They used nutrient and McConkey agar plates for their tests. The LifeStraw filter reduced bacteria ten-fold whereas there was no reduction in bacteria with the two types of cloth. This project could be used as an inquiry-based exercise with a focus on environmental justice in which students can simulate experiments that they might conduct while living in an area where the water supply might be compromised. We presented this poster before the disastrous flooding in Houston and devastation wrought by two hurricanes in the Caribbean, so a project like this might be apropos now more than ever.

Keywords:  microbiology, Water Quality, Inquiry-based learning, water filtration, water quality analysis, water filters

University of Wisconsin, Madison (2017)