The project

Basically their project puts emphasis on curbing oil polluting the water. Staying at Guwahati and seeing the pitiable condition of the river Brahmaputra behind the Numaligarh refinery moved them a lot. Not only Guwahati but throughout the country tons of oils are thrown directly into the water bodies, thereby, destroying the ecosystem and its balance. So, they thought of helping the environment in an "inexpensive and easy" way.

They were discussing possible ways of addressing this problem when Nikhilesh recollected his childhood experience. He shared that when he was a child his mother always used to put oil in his hair, which he disliked a lot because the oil used to stick to his hair. They thought that human hair must be possessing some property because of which the oil sticks to it[i]. They experimented with it and succeeded.

Both of them then were surfing the internet one day when they came across an article about an oil tanker spillage in the Persian Gulf. They read about the death of sea-gulls and other migratory birds whose feathers had got soaked in oil rendering them unable to fly. They brought some bird feathers and put it over some engine oil floating in water kept in a beaker. When they picked up the feathers, they found much of the oil sticking to the feather[ii].

Another incident gave them their third ingredient. A carpenter, at Nihkilesh’s house, cleaned some oil off the floor by putting and rubbing some saw dust[iii] over it.  They tried it in and succeeded.  The use of hay was also serendipity. After finding four such ingredients that could absorb oil, they planned to combine the four and test the efficacy in curbing oil pollution.

The Experiment

One day Nikhilesh and Debanjan took 4 beakers from school and collected some waste human hair, sawdust, bird feathers & straw from different places and then poured water on the 4 beakers and then added oil to each of the beakers. Then, they added waste human hair, sawdust, bird feathers & straw respectively and on the very first attempt all the oil present in the beakers was absorbed and removed completely.  Later on analyzing further they found that the oil was removed due to the phenomenon of adsorption.

Advantages and possibility of diffusion

There are many advantages of this idea. Firstly, the materials that have been used in removing the oil effluents from water such as waste human hair, sawdust, bird feathers & straw, are all wastes themselves. Hence this process involves using one waste to clean up another. Secondly, this system is very much effective and cleans up almost 100 per cent of the oil effluents from water. Thirdly, this is a simple, cost effective and environment friendly idea and can be used economically in refineries.  

Before submitting this project to NIF, they had presented this idea in State Level Science Fair held in Guwahati in the year 2005 where they won the first prize and also won the very prestigious Tulika Das Memorial Award. They were selected to present the project in the Eastern India Science Fair held in BITM Kolkata in the same year where they bagged the best State Exhibit Prize. This event was even telecasted on a number of local news channels and was covered in a number of news papers including The Telegraph.  Both of them are now completing their studies and plan to work more on such innovative ideas that can solve persistent problems of the society.