Category: Projects

The SDG that I’ve worked on for the last semester is goal 14. Otherwise known as Life underwater. Goal 14 focuses on the safety of water and making sure that all water bodies are clean of pollution and save endangered aquatic animals.

The target I focused on here is analysing whether or not a river is polluted at the chemical level. Sometimes a river may, look clean but it’s pH could be very acidic or it could contain larges amounts of ammonia. My project in particular focused on Bull creek. Bull creek is an artificially made water body with the purpose of being a deposit of all of bull creek’s waste water. This extremely dirty water will get cleaned as it passes down the river. The end goal of this is to clean the water before it reaches canning river.

Bull creek has been doing this job since it was 1968 when the river was dug out. The creek was actually named after an early settler by the name of Henry bull, who owned the land since 1830. Before the settlers came, the creek was already a very wet place. In fact it was very significant to the Wadjuk Beeliar tribe. They referred to this wetland as the “Gabiljee” meaning water place.

My project involved many chemical and physical tests down at bull creek to answer one major question.

“Is bull creek doing it’s job?”

My plan was to make write a scientific report on my findings and compare test results from 2 different sites. The first site was at the beginning of bull creek. This water is expected to be dirty here as this is the place where all the sewerage feeds. The second site is located at the end of the bull creek. This sight is behind Rossmoyne senior high school under a bridge. The water here should be cleaner as it’s only a few metres from depositing into canning river.

This project is part of goal 14 as it’s focused on helping water quality at the local level here, in bull creek.

During this project I worked by myself. This meant that I could work at my own pace. During my time on this project I often took breaks and helped my classmates with their projects. Of course I would always get my work done in the end.

In the beginning my goal was to create a scientific report to express all the data I was going to collect down at the creek. It took a while get approval to leave the school and do testing so in the mean time I practiced using the pH indicator and the other tests (Ammonia, Nitrite, Nitrate) on tap water. Curiously while doing this I noticed that the hangar’s tap water is highly alkali.

Once given approval to go down the creek I got to see both sites for the first time. I took with me, two 2L bottles to hold the water from each site, A salinity tester and a bucket. The salinity tester also doubled as a thermometer. This was useful because the temperature would’ve definitely changed by the time I got back to the hangar. During this I had to try and memorise each the temperatures of each site and which bottle holds which sites water. I should’ve planned this part ahead of time. When I got back I entered in my first results and got to testing.

The first test was a huge success and now with the data I’ve received I can start to work on the report. The first few stages of the report were very simple. I needed to write a hypothesis and materials. I even learnt how to write additional parts of scientific reports that I’ve never known about previously. For example a risk assessment.

Finally came the day when I would do, what I thought would be my final journey to bull creek. I emptied the water from the previous tests and cleaned them and my other materials. Mind you, these two testing dates were months apart. I was very curious how different (or similar) the results would be.

The second test taken in Term 4 was very different to the first test, just as I’d hoped. Unfortunately though, a problem came up. Amongst my plethora of tests I had two pH testers. One was a digital stick and the other was a solution based indicator. The problem lay with the data collected from them. The two pH testers gave me drastically different results. Perhaps the digital tester was calibrated wrong or the solution test was diluted. The only way I could find out the true pH was to use a Universal indicator.

So, with the help of my teacher Mrs Donnelly, I borrowed one from the science office and tested both term 4 sites again. Unfortunately I couldn’t test the term 3 sites. But this was better than doing nothing.

The universal indicator test has shown us that the previous results were largely exaggerating the rivers alkalinity. Instead both sites sit at a pH of 6.

Of course, the only thing I’d do differently was to use the universal indicator on all 4 tests rather than the later two. This wasn’t possible because by the time I realised the error in the pH tester the Term 3 tests were long emptied. Maybe next time.

The end of goal of my task isn’t yet finished as I still need to compare the data against each other and again with the ideal river qualities. This leaves two options. Either bull creek is doing its job. Or not. If so then we can leave it or monitor it incase something changes. If it isn’t then I will start a new project on how we can fix this and make sure bull creek functions as it should to make a healthier canning river.

During this project I found that I had improved on my

Finally, I would like to thank my Teacher and classmates for helping me with all of the testing and being patient with me as I dragged them down the creek for testing every so often.