Our nightmare

Last year, Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu Province, China, suffered from the serious tap water pollution caused by benzene leaking. Although it happened in April, 2014, citizens in Lanzhou are still in the shadows of water pollution. If you open your eyes to the whole world, it is easy for you to find that the whole world is in a nightmare of water pollution. Water pollution accounts for 80% of all infectious diseases reported by WHO. World-wide around 1.1 billion people lack access to improved water sources. There is no doubt that millions of people care about the water quality and are eager to know whether their water is safe and available.

Our human practice

Since last year we designed a novel microbial fuel cell (MFC) system and were able to detect the concentration of PNP (p-nitrophenol) in aqueous solution. We decided to create a convenient and low-cost device to detect some contaminants in water such as heavy metal ion. Before our program running, we carried out our human practice both in China and abroad as we’d like to know the present situations and people’s attitudes to water pollution all over the world.

Human practice in China consists of questionnaire survey and public education. Besides, we did the Internet survey by Twitter, microblog, WeChat and other approaches outside China and got many useful data from 9 counties.

Questionnaire survey

Aiming at the difference between China and western countries, we designed two kinds of questionnaires including Chinese questionnaire and English questionnaire, which is basically similar (Chinese questionnaire , English questionnaire ). We totally acquired 369 questionnaires.

The survey in China was carried out both online and offline. We used an online survey website and collected 148 effective questionnaires. We also got 136 effective questionnaires during the public education in Lanzhou city. As to the English questionnaire, we put it on the surveymonkey website and promoted it by Twitter, WeChat and other medium to get more data. Finally, we recycled 85 effective questionnaires from 6 different countries (Australia, Canada, USA, Japan, Portugal, Singapore) locating in four continents. All of these countries belong to developed country.

We drew some interesting conclusion from all of the 369 questionnaires.

During the research, we tried to let the respondents estimate the heavy metal pollution level in the earth and choose some countries and places suffering from severe heavy metals contamination without providing them any statistics of it. After collecting enough data, we compared and analyzed the questionnaire statistics we collected.

Obviously, from the public perspective, severe heavy metal pollution usually occurs in industrial areas and comparable prosperous cities in the developing countries. Without doubting, it is very easy to understand that they sacrifice the environment to get the economic growth.

Most of the countries, when it comes to its growth from ‘developing’ to ‘developed’, with the multifactor including population growth, industry accumulating, imperfect technique and the climate and geography of its own, they do have more and severer heavy metal pollution.

We did the similar analysis of China according to data from Chinese questionnaires as well.

According to the Chinese residents, whatever the pollutant is, pollution seems always concentrate at the middle and downstream of a river. At the same time, the industrial center of China lies at the downstream of Yangtze River and Yellow River, so these areas become the worst-hit area of heavy metal pollution. However, taking Yangtze River as an example, there are several polluted areas in the upstream which are the same severe situation as the downstream.

The data of this graph comes from our Chinese questionnaire as well. Most people regard mercury, lead, copper, lead, copper and chromium as the serious heavy metal pollution. On the one hand, it may be an objective reflection of present situation in China. On the other hand, reports from different medium recent years might contribute to the variation of the data, because the reports about mercury , lead, copper and chromium contaminants were in the majority, which corresponds to our graph. But we still need to do some professional statistics when it comes to how serious it is about the heavy metal water pollution in China.

What’s more, the analysis of our questionnaire survey around the world verified the necessity of our idea and project.

Table 1 The statistics of questionnaire

There are four main conclusions which

1.Water pollution is serious and concerned: More than 45% respondents both in China and western country think they are contaminants in the local water and over 68% of them care about the water pollution. These results shows that it is high time detected and treated the heavy metal pollution in water. And that is the goal and meaning of our project.

2.Chemical detection and Biological detection are known by more people than physical methods.

Most people know chemical detection, while there more people are aware of biological detection outside China in several developed countries, which indicated with the development of society, people prefer to convenient, environment friendly and cheap biological detection.

3.Most people agree with modified microbes using for contamination but many don’t know it. So many people, over 70% respondents, accept biological treatment of heavy metal pollution in water, which means it is possible for us to promote our device to the public. Meanwhile, since many don’t know biological treatment, it will be a rather meaningful thing for us to spread related knowledge about modified microbes for pollution treatment.

Public education

We also made some interesting and educational activities. We showed our ideas about our detecting system ‘micro holmes’ to the public and handed out some booklets to them to help them know more about some water health. There is no doubt that the highlights of our public education is field experimentation, which attracted a lot of people. The live demonstration experiment is easy but useful and interesting, which is a novel approach to public education.

There are more details about our public education.

On the first day of the May Day holiday, a sea of people visited the zoo. Our team, LZU-China, seized this opportunity to do our human practice, a propaganda of common sense about water, which helps the citizens developing a healthy habit of using water. By the way, we also spread some information about how to detect pollutant inside water and the basic knowledge of Microbial Fuel Cell.

1.Live demonstration experiment

The live demonstration experiment was the most wonderful key link. It attracted lots of passerby especially kids. There were so many children even adults who want to have a try to experience the glamour of science, particularly the experiment of a colorimetric method to measure the concentration of the iron ion and doubtlessly. The live demonstration experiment achieved a great result that whoever joining in it highly praised our activity.

2.Propaganda and survey

We handed out many leaflets about water health to visitors and collected a part of questionnaire, meanwhile, we presented our project to those who are interesting in it.

Through this activity, we not only hope to help the citizens establish a proper awareness towards water protection and the way they using water but also acquire some useful information to meet the public requirements and perfect our experiment scheme so that we can have an adequate preparation this year and flame our beauty in front of the world. It was our honor that so many visitors thought highly of our program and this public education.

All of the human practice encouraged us go further.