Do you need hard evidence that some “flushable” wipes products really don’t break down as advertised? Sixth-grader Savanna Ballard has it.
She called her project in the Harmony Grove Elementary School science fair, “Don’t Flush That Flushable!” The project won first place in the fair’s Earth and Environmental Division, then took second place in a regional science fair at Southern Arkansas University. It also did a service to her community of Camden, Ark., and its water utility, because the story of her findings made the local newspaper.
No one was prouder than Savanna’s father, Keith Ballard, wastewater plant supervisor for Camden Water Utilities, who gave her the idea for the project and offered guidance and clerical help along the way.
Proof positive
In Savanna’s experiments, none of five brands of wipes broke down anywhere near as completely as toilet paper, which served as a control. The test procedure was simple. Savanna bought five brands of wipes labeled as flushable. She put a sheet of each product in a separate jar of water and a sheet of toilet tissue in another jar. She then stirred each jar vigorously every two hours for eight hours — her father felt that would reasonably simulate the agitation a wipe would receive going through a sewer system.
For the Harmony Grove fair, Savanna simply displayed the jars, showing that the wipes had not broken down the way toilet paper did. She wrote up the results, typed them with help from her father, and pasted the information on a large display board in classic science fair format: problem, hypothesis, variables, procedure, research, data, results, conclusion.
“The judges said it was pretty interesting, and they had never seen anything like that before,” Savanna recalls. In fact, they later told her science teacher, Michele Lawson, that they liked the project because it dealt with a current problem. They also said Savanna would have won the fair’s overall top prize if she had included some mathematical data.
To the next level
Savanna took care of that for the regional science fair, by which time the various wipes had been immersed in water for six weeks. With help from her father, she used a lab oven at the Camden Wastewater Treatment Plant to dry a fresh sample of each wipe and the wipes from the jars. Then she weighed each piece on a balance in the lab and calculated the percent of each tested wipe that had broken down. The accompanying table shows the results.
Savanna’s work with her project didn’t end with the science fairs — she displayed her project in late April at the Arkansas Water Works & Water Environment Association Annual Conference and Exposition.
Natural scientist
Lawson notes that Harmony Grove teaches students to understand the scientific method: “There’s a reason scientists investigate things. Savanna knew there was a real problem that people needed to be aware of. She flourishes in science. She has a natural aptitude for it. This wasn’t the first time she has gone to regionals for a science project.
“She was really invested in the project. Working with the scientific method just propelled her to the top. She was competing against hundreds of kids at the regional fair, so to get second place was awesome. Her confidence level went up, her writing skills went up.”
And best of all, thanks to Savanna, more people in Camden know how to be vigilant about disposing of wipes properly — in the trash and not the toilet.
