Environmental Sustainability dives into oil spills

Wando’s Environmental Sustainability class has been learning about oil spills and the challenging cleanup that follows them. Students were tasked to design a model that would effectively extract oil from water with minimal waste used. Virtual students set up their experiment at home, coming as close as possible to the in-class lab.  Senior Charlie Rohaley reflects on the experiment, “It puts you in a different mindset of what’s actually going on. You never actually think about the cleanup process and how it goes down and it’s actually pretty complicated and hard.” The experiment helped to give to students perspective of the heavy impact that an oil spill can have on an ecosystem.  

“You’re more mindful of what’s going on to clean up the oil and the process of it…We collected a good bit of waste, which makes you think about the amount of waste that is actually being collected in real life…I mean it is really tricky,” Rohaley said.

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Graham McAlister

Freshman Rhett Walker pokes a hole in a paper cup containing motor oil that is then dumped into a pool of water. The hole in the cup represents the way oil would seep out of a tanker in a real spill.