A new research project for our younger students: Home pollutants

Surely, your family has lot of chemical products for domestic use at home. Some of them are detergent or fabric softener; we use them for washing our clothes. Bleach, grease remover or antilime cleaner are used for cleaning our houses. All of them contain toxic chemicals we leave to the environment. And it is the same with other products we use with our own body like the alcohol or the hydrogen peroxide we use to disinfect wounds or the nail polish remover we use for cleaning our painted fingernails. Do they affect living beings?

This is the main goal of the project we are beginning. We are going to study if this products are toxic for the environment, especially for plants. We want to know if they affect aspects of plants biology as germination, growth and development of plants.

We begin our experiments studying the effect of these products on the germination of seeds. We are going to use lentil seeds (Lens culinaris). We have prepared seed germination chambers with Petri dishes; we have placed paper towel inside the plates and we have added 20 ml of the different solutions of chemical products. We have put 16 seeds per germination chamber.

We are going to carry out control experiments. In some plates we will add only water. We want to know the viability of seeds irrigated only with water. Later on, we will compare the number of germinated seeds in plates with water and chemical products. We consider that seeds have germinated when they show a little root at least one millimeter long. We will study seeds germination for a week.

(Spanish version)