This is SCIENCE!!

I have decided to dedicate an entire blog spot to respond to a question that I was asked today about my latest post “It has been a long cigarette butt filled road…but we made it” the question that was asked was:

“I'm reading your post and seeing all these mistakes you made. Aren't you bothered by this? Aren't you concerned that your research grade would be lowered because of it? I don't get it”

I feel that this may be a question that is on everyone’s minds as they are on the outside of the glass computer screen viewing myself and my fellow undergraduate researchers in our efforts to… well… do science. 

So before I begin to try to answer this question I would like to ask you, what is science? According to the Google definition search science is 

sci·ence

ˈsīəns/

Noun: science

    The intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.

To put it simply science is observing, studying and experimenting to learn how the world works. One of the reasons why I love science and experimenting is because it is not as cut and dry, yes or no answers like that of a math class. When a scientist runs an experiment they will get a result whether it was what they hypothesized would happen or nothing at all. No results is a result all in itself in science, a great quote that embodies this is “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” Thomas Edison in regards to inventing the light bulb and his many attempts.

So to answer your question about the “mistakes” I made and does it bother me… well I didn’t make any so no I am not bothered by this. What I did do is I figured out procedures for this experiment that I would change if I chose to recreate it. I also figured out that one cigarette butt per liter of water may be lethal to minnows but it is definitely not enough concentration to pick up any heavy metal traces with a SenSafe test strip (that I wouldn’t use again either if I have the choice). What I did observe is that the heated beakers may have shown a higher concentration of heavy metals so I will be recreating that experiment in the future… but this time I won’t leave the water to evaporate over four days… OK that may have been one mistake I made and I kicked myself as soon as I opened the black box…

Anyways

 What I am trying to get across is that there is no right or wrong way to experiment, even when your experiment doesn’t go as planned you still learned something. I was so relieved to finally see positive results with the test strips but throughout the experiment after all of the issues and yellow test strips all I could say was “well… this is science.” I am not worried about my grade being effected because even though my experiment didn’t go how I imagined, it was still a successful experiment. I have positive results that show cigarette butts do in fact leach heavy metals into water and in order to pick them up with a test strip that concentration has to be at one cigarette butt per 50ml distilled water. That little bit of knowledge will be my stepping stone for future experiments I will run testing whether salinity has an effect on the leaching process and (eventually) studying the effects sediments and aquatic plants have on the leaching process.

I hope this was helpful in clarifying any misconceptions about my experimental process, and if you still "don't get it" please feel free to ask additional questions in the comments below.

It has been a long cigarette butt filled road... but we made it

Cigarette Butts,

The last form of Acceptable litter

 

  Cigarette butts are one of the last remaining acceptable forms of litter, accounting for over 32 percent of the litter clean up from the beaches. Every year over 4.5 trillion cigarettes are littered into the environment, a majority of these will make their way into our water sources causing havoc on the marine environment and the organisms that live there. Once a cigarette butt reaches the water it will begin to degrade leaching harmful chemicals and heavy metals into the environment. Many of these toxic substances will accumulate in the sediments and will be inadvertently consumed by sediment dwelling invertebrates and filter feeders that will transport the toxins through the food chain eventually leading to humans. the harmful toxins are not the only issue behind cigarette butt litter, the filter itself is dangerous to marine organisms. the cellulose acetate filter is not biodegradable it is actually photodegradable meaning it can take years for the sun's UV light to break down the filters. Most of the time the filters are mistaken for a food source my a bird or fish before they can degrade causing the organism to either starve to death or choke. There are several companies that are trying to find an alternative to the cellulose acetate filter, like that of Green Butts or Seed Cigs that use natural fibers so that the butt will fully degrade in months rather than years; however these are still in the developmental stages. I wanted to preform an experiment that would test the heavy metal leaching from cigarette butts into the environment. I decided to start out with the basics and just test to see in temperature had an effect on the rate of which the metals would leach, if they leached at all...

My First Experiment:

Tools:

Nylon Gloves

tweezers

distilled water

1.5 gallon tanks

SenSafe water metals test kit

thermometer

camel light cigarette butts

50 watt heaters

tape

sharpie marker

glass jar to store cigarette butts

plastic baggies to hole used test strips

Methods:

 My first experiment was supposed to show the differences between water temperatures in the leaching process of heavy metals out of the cigarette butts. I started out by prepping 7 1.5 gallon tanks by washing them in as little tap water as possible in hope to limit the contaminates contributed to the tanks from the tap water; as well as, rinsing with DI water to remove any residual tap water that may remain. I repeated this process for all 7 of the tanks and let them air dry as I prepared the other tools. I then washed and rinsed with DI water the 7 heaters that I would be using in each of the tanks along with the glass lids that would cover the tanks. I then took the tanks into the black box and using a 1000 ml beaker I proceeded to fill each tank up with 3 liters of distilled water (3000 ml) making sure to use a piece of tape and a sharpie marker to mark the water level to monitor any evaporation that may occur. I then set a heater in each of the tanks but only plugged in the 6 experimental tanks leaving the control unplugged. I set the first three tanks to a temperature that was supposed to measure around 79˚F and the last three tanks set to a degree that should have measured around 85˚F and I labeled each tank using tape and a sharpie marker and made sure to separate the tanks with cardboard to help insulate. I placed three cigarette butts with approximately 1 cm tobacco remaining into each of the 6 experimental tanks leaving the control empty, then I covered each tank and left them to reach temperature overnight. When I arrived the following day I was met with 7 cold tanks, after a frantic mess of checking wires and the power strip I discovered that the power strip itself had been unplugged sometime during my time of absence which leads me to…

ERROR ONE:

Each tank was at room temperature during the first test strip data due to someone unplugging the power strip.

The test strips showed little differences from the control strip leading me to believe that the either was too little concentrations to be shown or none at all. This is what I expected from the first day so I wasn’t too discouraged especially since each tank was left at room temperature. Day ones results were as followed:

Tank	control	Tank 1 A	Tank 2 A	Tank 3 A	Tank 1 B	Tank 2 B	Tank 3 B
Temp ˚F	59	60.8	62.6	62.6	64.4	64.4	66.2
Strip color	yellow	Yellow	Yellow	Yellow	Yellow	Yellow	yellow

I plugged the power strip back in and left it overnight to hopefully come to temperature again so that I would have better results with my next test. The following day I arrived to warm tanks and pretty decrepit cigarette butts which gave me hope that today I may just see the results that I have been expecting to see. I proceeded to take the temperatures of each of the tanks making sure to stay away from the heaters themselves to not throw off the temperature reading. I was then hit with another road block…

                ERROR 2:

The heaters were not heating the water to the desired temperature so further tampering with the temperature levels were needed.   

  

Again the test strips showed little to no difference from the control strip except for tank 2 B that showed a slight discoloration. As you can imagine I was quite excited to see this color difference but after the next test I think it may have been a piece of tobacco that touched the strip. Day 2’s test strip results were as followed:

Tank	Control	Tank 1 A	Tank 2 A	Tank 3 A	Tank 1 B	Tank 2 B	Tank 3 B
Temp ˚F	59	73.4	73.4	73.4	77	78.8	78.8
Strip color	Yellow	Yellow	Yellow	Yellow	Yellow	Yellow/red	yellow

I decided to turn the three tank B’s up as high as they would go and turn the tank A’s up by “10” degrees then I left the tanks to sit for two days. When I returned two days later for the third test I noted that there was slight evaporation in the heated tanks. This can be an issue because it will concentrate the sample giving readings that would not necessarily represent the original sample. After waiting two days I came back and tested the tanks for the third time receiving results just like the other two test. Day (test) 3’s results were as followed:

Tank	Control	Tank 1 A	Tank 2 A	Tank 3 A	Tank 1 B	Tank 2 B	Tank 3 B
Temp ˚F	59	73.4	75.2	73.4	78.8	78.8	77
Strip color	Yellow	Yellow	Yellow	Yellow	Yellow	Yellow	yellow

After receiving all my data I decided to stand back and look at the experiment as a whole… what could be some of the factors in why I wasn’t getting positive results with my test strips? The water had turned an ice tea shade of brown at this point, could there really be no heavy metals in the water? I decided to run one last test on this experiment. I had to clean up the tanks so that another student could use them but I had one more night to try to solve this mystery. I took all the tanks and to the best of my ability I concentrated all six of the tanks into one, making sure I got all tobacco and cigarette but remains into the tank while limiting the water allowed. Was not the most professional experiment but I was desperate, I was just after some form of a result from these test strips. After letting the concentrated tank and the control sit overnight one last time I tested again, and EUREKA! I got the results I was looking for! The two test strips showed a discoloration between the control and the test tank, though they were slight it was still a result in my book and it showed me that all I needed to do was to up my concentrations. This meant running a whole separate experiment where I decided to throw the two different heated temperatures out the window and just do room temp and a heated temperature. 

 

Experiment 2:

Tools: 

500 ml beakers

Nylon Gloves

tweezers

distilled water

SenSafe water metals test kit

camel light cigarette butts

50 watt heaters

tape

sharpie marker

glass jar to store cigarette butts

plastic baggies to hold used test strips 

Methods: 

My second experiment was purely to get some form of results weather it was that no heavy metals were leaching or that my concentrations were just off. I set up the experiment by using 5 500ml beakers, 5 heaters, and distilled water. I put 500 ml distilled water into each of the beakers as well as a heater in each. I came up with the concentration of one cigarette butt per 50 ml distilled water making it a total of ten cigarette butts per beaker. I set up the experiment by having one control that was just distilled water and an unplugged heater, two beakers that had distilled water/ cigarette butts/ and an unplugged heater, and two beakers that had distilled water/ cigarette butts/ and plugged in heaters set at the highest temp. I left these to sit over the holiday break and when I arrived to take my test I was met by a surprise….

ERROR 3:

Water evaporates when there is a heater introduced?! I had to laugh to myself, I was so caught up on getting concentrations down that it didn’t occur to me that the water would be evaporating over those four days. I can in to two beakers almost bone dry with crusted cigarette butts (thank god they didn’t catch fire.)

 Luckily I was able to get a few milliliters of liquid from the samples to run a test on just to see what would happen. The non-heated beakers were able to be tested as well as the control. After testing the control, two non-heated, and one from the heated I was able to get results that do indeed show that there are heavy metals being leached into the water. My next step will be to take the water from the non-heated beakers and run an arsenic test on them to hopefully show that arsenic is one of the heavy metals being leached into the water, I will have those results for the next blog post.

Its time to get hot and salty

 After weeks of fine tuning what I am going to do for my research project I have finally come up with an experiment that I believe will be a stepping stone for further research opportunities.

To start off let me introduce my scientific question,

Does temperature and salinity have an effect on the leeching of Cadmium and Arsenic into water?

What I am planning on doing is running two separate experiments testing the temperature’s effect as well as the salinity’s effect on the leeching of the heavy metals from cigarette butts.

Graph from the EPA website

I plan on testing two temperatures one based on the pre-industrial average water temperatures, and then another at a predicted increased temperature due to global climate change. I have read that by the year 2100 ocean temperature will have risen by 1.2-2.6 degrees Celsius and that since 1980 ocean temperatures have risen by .85 degrees Celsius, but I am having trouble finding out the exact temperatures. I may have to get today’s average and then add or subtract based on these observations.

 When testing the salinity I will also be using two different concentrations to run my experiment. I will be using a salinity concentration that is hyposaline (<30 ppt) and one that is hypersaline (>38 ppt) to test to see if the increased salinity has any effect on the amount of heavy metal leeching into the water. 

Due to my previous research on the experiment with cigarette butts toxicity to minnows, I will be using one smoked cigarette butt with 1 cm of remaining tobacco per liter of water. Because I will be using the two gallon tanks in the lab I will use 7 liters of water with 7 cigarette butts. I will take samples every day at the same time for five days during both experiments and test them for both cadmium and arsenic and record my data. What I expect to find is that the concentrations level out when the metals are fully leached out of the cigarette butts, however I am interested to see if the salinity or temperature increases or decreases this time period.

Would you like some metal with your aphrodisiac?

Oysters in lab

While conducting my research on cadmium and its effects on the sediments I came across an interesting article, “Rising temperatures toxic for sea-dwellers.” The article was about a study that was conducted to measure the effects that global climate change will have on organism’s sensitivity to toxins in the water. Though it doesn’t necessarily have to do with sediments there has been a lot of talk about global climate change lately in class and I thought it was really neat to see the effects global climate change will have on cadmium toxicity. The researcher’s experiment consisted of measuring the metabolic rates and the ability to synthesis ATP (the main energy in a cell) of eastern oysters at different temperatures in both clean water as well as water that was polluted with the heavy metal cadmium. What the researchers found was that during increased temperatures the toxic effects of the cadmium also increased in the oysters by limiting their ability to synthesis ATP making the organism less likely to survive due to an energy deficit. If that isn’t bad enough the increase in temperatures also increase the speed of metal intake of the organism leading to an increase of accumulation of the toxin in the organism. 

 

Oysters are known for two things, being an aphrodisiac and producing pearls. I bet you didn't know that that pearl was once a little piece of debris that found its way into the shell. Maybe even some toxic sediment is to thank for that pretty necklace. Sediments are not just a place for organisms and plants to live, sediments can also be a pollutant. When sediments are washed into a river by storm

Sedimentation in Chattahoochee River, Atlanta, Georgia

drainage they will carry all the pollutants from the roads into the water and can also cause habitat loss on shorelines when water levels increase from the increased sediment. The part that caught my attention is that when that sediment reaches the water what is it going to do? Is it going to immediately settle out to the bottom nice and neatly? Maybe in as perfect world but here in reality it will become suspended solids in the water. Sediment particles absorb sunlight and increase the water’s temperature, one of the pollutants found in the storm water runoff are cigarette butts that leach out cadmium… do you see where I am going with this? It would be interesting to break away from the global climate change idea and do an experiment with the increased temperatures caused by sedimentation, I wonder if it also has an effect on the toxicity of cadmium. I think it will be an interesting study to do in the future if I do find that cigarette butts are leaching cadmium into the sediments.

There's poison in the drinking water!!!

Last week I mentioned a handful of the chemicals that I keep stumbling across in my research on cigarette butts; Cadmium, arsenic, and lead. I was asked the question: “What levels are acceptable in the environment, based on EPA standards, and what levels actually produce the impacts that you mentioned in your post?” 

while looking at the EPA website I could only find the “acceptable” levels for drinking water and they are as follows:

Cadmium- 0.005 mg/L

Arsenic- 0.010 mg/L

Lead- 0.015 mg/L

However I have been trying to research the different chemicals that are associated with cigarette butts and the tobacco within them and I was running into very vague explanations. After extensive research over the past weeks finally (Eureka!) I have found information on the chemical’s effects on the marine environment! I found a UK website that researched the effects of the chemicals on marine environments and the toxic levels.

Cadmium is naturally found in the earth’s crust at an average concentration of 0.1 mg/kg and is in higher concentration in sedimentary rocks. Cadmium also occurs naturally in the atmosphere because of volcanic activity; this atmospheric cadmium is absorbed by phytoplankton in the ocean’s surface waters and then transported to the depths. Due to upwelling the cadmium will be brought back to the surface and added to the concentrations from human activity. Cadmium is toxic to a range of micro organisms and effects the growth and replication. What I found interesting is that apparently the toxicity is reduced by the presence of sediments and high concentrations of dissolved salts and organic matter. I am expecting the presence of sand and aquatic plants will have a positive result on the levels of cadmium when I run my experiments. Certain factors like increased temperature, lowered salinity, and the combination with zinc will increase the toxicity on marine invertebrates effecting not only the growth and reproduction but also cause structural abnormalities in gill structures. The effects of cadmium toxicity on fish include malformation of the spine and is most susceptible to the embryo and larvae, surprisingly the egg is least susceptible to the effects of toxicity. To answer the question about the “acceptable” levels in the environment are any concentrations above 2.5 µg/l in the water column and 0.7 mg/kg in sediments (Canadian interim marine sediment quality guidelines) pose a risk to marine organisms and sediment dwelling organisms

Lead is poorly soluble in water so its main entry into the water is through releases. Due to its low solubility in water lead deposits into sediments and suspended particles. The organic compounds are found to be more toxic than the inorganic lead salts to fish and is more susceptible to younger fish than adults and eggs; the symptoms of lead toxicity include spinal deformity and blackening of the caudal region. The toxic range for fish has been documented as a range from 0.04 mg/L to 0.198 mg/L. Since lead deposits into the sediment it can possibly be toxic to sediment-dwelling organisms at concentrations above 30.2 mg/kg. Lead will bioaccumulate in the environment and it is unsure whether organisms absorb the lead or consume it. In fish lead is accumulated mostly in gill, liver, kidney, and bone. The eggs show increasing lead levels with increased exposure concentration, but there are indications that lead is present on the egg surface and not accumulated in the embryo. In shell fish the lead accumulates in the shell rather than the flesh, and dolphins will pass it to young through fetal development and lactation. The acceptable levels in the environment are as follows: acute toxicity to algae, invertebrates and fish at concentrations of dissolved lead above 10 µg/L annual average in the water column and concentrations above 30.2 mg/kg in sediment will effect sediment dwelling organisms. 

Arsenic is naturally found in the environment as a result of biological activity, the acceptable range of arsenic in the marine environment is 25 mg/L annual concentrations. Concentrations in sediments above concentrations above 7.24 mg/kg have been found to pose a risk for sediment dwelling organisms. Bioaccumulation can occur due to the sediments and the water column; however it is not biomagnified in food chains. This means that arsenic will accumulate in the environment through sediments and suspended particles, and will be absorbed by organisms, but will not be increased from fish feeding on each other like the accumulation of mercury.

The grass is greener on the otherside... of the ash tray

In doing research trying to find what chemicals and metals are leaching from cigarette butts I stumbled upon something interesting. They are called Green Butts and they are biodegradable cigarette butts! 

Apparently these new aged cigarette butts are made from flax, hemp and cotton with a starch based binder; as well as, will have no added chemicals. If that doesn’t sound too good to be true, apparently when these filters are thrown on the ground they will actually grow grass and flowers too and full biodegrade in two months! Unfortunately Green Butts are not readily available quite yet, according to their website they are trying to release them by 2014. While trying to look up more information on the Green Butts I also found another company called Cigg Seeds which is also another biodegradable cigarette butt that is infused with wildflower seeds.

All these ideas are still concepts and have yet to be produced so it leaves me with the question of how? How are the chemicals that will still be present in the tobacco be absorbed by the natural filter, and how will the seeds be affected by the toxins? Will the plant aid in the filtering out of the toxins before they are leached into the environment?

Some of the chemicals that I have found to leach out of cigarette butts are cadmium, arsenic, and lead into the water which have been shown to bioaccumulation in marine organisms. Cadmium has been shown to cause a malformation of the spine in fish and increased cadmium in the sediments poses a risk to sediment dwelling organisms and Arsenic levels have been shown to slow the growth of some marine algae’s as well as being potentially lethal to organisms. Lead can have the ability to wipe out entire populations of microorganisms, it affects the nervous system of organisms, and it is able to accumulate in sediments and plant life. These are some of the chemicals that I will like to test for when I run my experiment, especially lead since I will be able to test the sediments, plants, and the water.

Up in Smoke

Last week I posted a blog where I talked about cigarette butts as a pollutant being my main focus of research. Mrs. Woodall asked me a series of questions that would help in my research. She asked me –“exactly what chemicals would be worthy of analysis? What actual chemicals are generally released into water/sediment? which ones are most toxic? and to which organisms? and at what levels?”

 

Cigarettes contain over 165 toxic chemicals and during the production of cigarettes from start to finish they have the potential to introduce over 4000 chemicals into the environment. This is taking into consideration the pesticides and fertilizer used on the tobacco, the flavoring or additives added to the tobacco, and the chemicals used to preserve the cigarette.

Marine Topsmelt

 

 

Freshwater Flat Head Minnow

After searching the internet for hours trying to find a list of chemicals and their potential affects on the environment I decided to revisit the test that was performed on  the marine topsmelt (Atherinops affinis) and the freshwater fathead minnow (Pimephales promelas) that I mentioned in last weeks blog.

In the experiment the researchers tested three different cigarette leachates:

The first leachates where with smoked cigarette butts, with 1–2 cm of remnant tobacco left intact with the filter, one test with artificially smoked cigarettes and one with naturally smoked cigarettes

 The second leachates where from smoked cigarette filters with all tobacco removed. This was performed three times, once with artificially smoked cigarettes and twice with naturally smoked cigarettes

The third leachates used where unsmoked cigarette filters with no tobacco, this test was only ran once.

Before introducing the minnows the researchers allowed the cigarette butts to soak for 24 hours and prepared several samples that were less concentrated (dilution is the solution to pollution right?) Each concentration was replicated four times and tested with 5 fish each making a total of 20 fish per concentration level. The test ran for 96 hours and the results where that there was a 50% mortality in the fish species.

The results between the artificially smoked cigarettes and naturally smoked cigarettes with tobacco remnants didn’t show much of a variation; however the artificially smoked cigarettes without tobacco were found to be more toxic than their naturally smoked counterparts. The reasons for this outcome was stated as “unclear”, maybe when the cigarette is being smoked naturally the person absorbs more of the toxins through the filter? At the end of the experiment it was found that toxicity increased significantly from unsmoked filters, no tobacco to smoked filters no tobacco to smoked filters with tobacco remnants. This leads me to believe that most of the toxins that result in fish mortality are found in the tobacco and not just the filter.

Some of the possible causes of toxicity that the researchers list are pesticides, nicotine which can be used as an insecticide,  Ethylphenol which has been shown to be capable of building up in aquatic organisms, and chemical additives such as ammonia; as well as, the glues and paper that go into making the filter. Not only do these toxins affect fish but they also effect daphnids (water flea) and marine bacteria which are important to the marine environment. 

I will have to conduct more research on which chemicals are the most abundance in cigarettes and what pesticides are more commonly used on tobacco plants. Do they vary based on brand? Where the tobacco was grown? Once I can pin point a cigarettes highest concentrated toxic chemicals I will be able to research the affects that they may have on the aquatic organisms. With so many toxins found in cigarettes and the overwhelming amount of information on the internet about cigarettes I am finding it hard to find information on the specific chemicals and their concentration levels.