Cleaning Up Oil Spills with Oil-Hungry Bacteria
Model various oil spills scenarios and monitor the effectiveness of the provided freeze-dried oil-degraded microbe mixture in remediating the waste. The students set up a simulated oil spill in water and treat it with the special microbial product to observe the physical changes and degradation of oil film over time. Additionally, they simulate three spills scenarios on beach sand , gravel and cobbles in order to observe the difference in degradationrates. The class also explores bioremediation methods for other waste chemicals and compare their effectiveness to traditional clean-up methods.