Photo courtesy of Janet Ort.
Pictured are the award-winning BioBucs, from left: Abhinav Gullapalli, Christian Lam, Elise Collins, Amagee Simms, Christian Pegouske and Andrew Geldermen.
Hoover High School senior Christian Pegouske has always loved being outside in nature. So, he got involved with the BioBucs, HHS’s environment science research competition team.
Last year, environmental science teacher Janet Ort said, Pegouske and his team were inspired to monitor the air after watching “Toxic City: Birmingham’s Dirty Secret,” a documentary created by Gasp, a local nonprofit for awareness and solutions to air pollution problems in Birmingham.
“[The documentary] talks about fighting for justice. I show [it] to students to demonstrate how local pollution can be linked to things you wouldn’t consider on first glance, like societal issues, poverty and race,” Ort said. “At about the same time, we read an article called ‘The Polluted Brain’ and it really just looked at pollution with its relationship to brain health.”
For the last two years, Pegouske and his six-person team have been recording and learning about air pollution by partnering with Gasp.
When the BioBucs presented their findings at the 2018-2019 Southeastern regional Lexus Eco Challenge, they won the competition. At the national competition, they won $17,000 worth in scholarships, split between the team members. Part of it, Ort said, was donated back to the environmental programs at HHS.
“Our big project was on the particle pollution, which was a really interesting and different thing,” Pegouske said. Particle pollution is the solid or liquid droplets in the air, many of which can negatively affect people’s health.
The team worked with Gasp volunteers and measured the particular matter through AirBeam sensors, some of which they made themselves, in conjunction with the AirCasting app. They recorded the particulate matter at Hoover High School, Southern Research STEM Lab and Sloss Furnaces, and then they analyzed the data and what contributing influences the nearby environment might have had on the air. They also shared data on what was safe to breathe and what wasn’t.
“What happens is the little sensors take a sample every minute. They average the pollution count, and then they compare it to a scale as to whether it’s safe or not,” Ort said. “We started using those, and we found out in certain areas the particle pollution was really high, just as you expected, and also if there were trees nearby, those really high counts of pollution were lower, and we started investigating all of that.”
The project, Pegouske said, has taught him much more about pollution than he previously knew, particularly about the value of trees.
“They really have these big benefits,” he said, and BioBucs and working with Gasp has helped him learn how trees can get rid of dangerous particle pollution over time.
Ort said they added a computer programming element to it and were able to make a Java-based decision model that businesses could use to help make decisions on what kinds of trees to plant and what the environmental payback system would be over the years.
When he and his team won the regional competition, Pegouske said, he was so excited to go on to the final competition. Several of his teammates are also his friends, he said, which made it even more fun for them.
In general, Gasp Executive Director Michael Hansen said, the public is aware that there have been improvements to air quality in Birmingham in the last 40 or so years due to the Clean Air Act passed in 1970, but the public is not aware that there are still dangerous ozone gases — which are invisible to the human eye — in the city that can be harmful to human health.
“[Air pollution] is not visible like it used to be. That’s because we have air pollution controls on a lot of facilities and it scrubs out the really dirty-looking stuff, though what we are left with is ultra-fine particles that are not visible, but they can still get into your lungs and your blood—it’s not good,” Hansen said.
Groups that can be especially sensitive to air pollution are children, people with asthma, pregnant women, seniors and people with chronic illnesses.
Pegouske said his team is bringing more awareness about their project.
“We are all working really hard at the project, and it’s great to see people come together and work on something like this and all be so passionate about a project,” Pegouske said.
Hansen suggests becoming a member of Gasp to receive air quality news and updates. He also suggests getting involved with Gasp or other environmental nonprofits, as well as signing up for free air quality alerts on airnow.gov, which is run by the Environmental Protection Agency.
“One of our long-term goals would be to install some stationary sensors and help people or teach people how to build them or how to design questions around the data both for schools and for neighborhoods and other installations because this whole idea of particle pollution is becoming more and more important to our understanding for human health,” Ort said.
For more information on air quality and upcoming events, go to gaspgroup.org.
