At Tesla STEM High School near Redmond, a group of students is working to encourage people to change the way they garden.
Sophomores Neha Hulkund, Anne Lee, Suchi Sridhar, Vaishnavi Phadnis and Isaac Perrin have been working on a project to educate the community on the effects of using inorganic phosphorus fertilizers.
The project is for the Lexus Eco Challenge, a competition that involves students researching an environmental issue that affects their community and then coming up with an action plan to address it.
PROJECT WORK
Since they started the project at the beginning of the school year, the five sophomores have boned up on the topic, reading up on research from various universities and interviewing someone from the Washington State Department of Ecology. They have also created a mini-documentary and website and have gone into classrooms at various elementary schools and one middle school in the Lake Washington School District (LWSD) to teach students. In addition, the teens spoke at a recent TEDxRedmond event, attended a local farmers market to spread the word and set up an informational booth during the Issaquah Salmon Days Festival. At the festival, they passed out brochures about inorganic fertilizers to passersby.
Lee said she has also reached out to local water districts in town as well as the Issaquah State Salmon Hatchery and has been able to distribute brochures and infographics for the public to view.
“Overall, this project has been a very rewarding learning experience for me and the rest of the team,” she said.
EFFECTS OF INORGANIC FERTILIZERS
The effects that come from using inorganic fertilizers act like a chain reaction.
Hulkund said the first effect has to do with how the ground absorbs the phosphorus from the fertilizer too quickly, which results in phosphorus-containing water runoff that flows back into area water bodies. She said this excess phosphorus then leads to an increased growth in algae.
The additional algae blocks the sunlight from filtering through to seabed plants, which then cannot photosynthesize and grow.
Hulkund added that when the algae decomposes, the bacteria produced consumes high levels of oxygen, turning the waters into hypoxic dead zones that are lethal to the aquatic plants and animals as they are deprived of oxygen. This greatly decreases the biodiversity and the loss of many organisms that are important to the ecosystem and food chain.
Hulkund said an example of where this has happened is the water at Juanita Beach Park in Kirkland. Currently, she said, the bacteria level is too high for people to swim in without getting rashes as a result.
Hulkund added that the water quality of Lake Sammamish had previously been on the decline, but measures have been taken — such as diverting waste away from the lake — and things are slowly starting to improve.
She said the quality of the lake reflects the quality of the watershed — where we get our drinking water. So when the lake’s water quality declines, so does the quality of our water, Hulkund said.
SPREADING THE WORD
When asked why it is important to inform the public about this issue, Lee referenced her environmental science teacher, Mike Town.
“One of his favorite sayings is that almost all environmental issues can be prevented and solved through public awareness,” she said. “In addition, Mr. Town always encourages his students to take the lead in the community through various outreach projects. This helped me realize that we could make a difference by simply educating others to choose organic fertilizers and to be more aware of our ecological footprints.”
Lee said her family has always used organic fertilizers, but she did not know why. She said her mother, an environmental scientist, told her how water quality problems could be caused by the overuse of inorganic fertilizer, and this sparked her interest in this topic.
In spreading awareness about the topic, a big part of the group’s work was presenting in classrooms.
Hulkund said they visited classrooms at Redmond, Samantha Smith and Louisa May Alcott elementary schools as well as Redmond Middle School.
“We had all gone to these schools before,” she said, explaining that the group just contacted some of their former teachers to set things up.
Lee said they decided on teaching at the elementary and middle school level because these students are the future generation and “will be able to make decisions that will determine what the environment will look like in a few decades.”
Both she and Hulkund said the students have been enthusiastic and engaged in the topic and asked a lot of questions.
“We were really surprised at how interested the kids were,” Hulkund said.
The main question they have asked, she said, was how they could help.
Lee added, “It’s been rewarding to know that we’ve been making a difference in our local community to help conserve the environment…It’s a great feeling knowing that young children have a passion to care about their environment, and it gives hope that we can preserve Mother Nature.”
HOW TO HELP
One of the ways to help, Hulkund said, is to switch to using organic fertilizer. She said in addition to being better for the environment, organic compost and organic fertilizers take longer to break down and the ground absorbs them more slowly. As a result, you don’t have to use as much, she said.
Hulkund added that organic fertilizer is available anywhere they sell garden supplies, such as Fred Meyer. She said it may be a few dollars more expensive, but the payoff outweighs the cost.
“In the end, it’s worth it,” she said about helping to preserve the environment.
