Tina Jin
7th Grade, The Harker School
San Jose, CA
“When I was watching the news after dinner last summer, I was shocked to see children drinking dirty murky brown water,” Tina says. “While I was picking which type of water to drink, some people couldn’t even have clean water.” She was upset to learn that one out of every three people don’t have access to clean water, and that many water filtration products were expensive and used parts that were difficult to find. Tina decided to create a water filter with something that many people have lying around — animal bones.
Turning Animal Bone Waste Into Water Filtration: Enhancing Accessibility of Clean, Drinkable Water Through Innovation
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Project Background
Tina started by slicing cow bones into thin slices and filtering water through the bone slices. She focused on trabecular bone — a spongy bone with porous structures found in places like the skull and ends of the long bones. Tina tested different types of “dirty” water — black tea, rose tea, water with microplastics in it and water from local streams — by pouring them through the bone slices. She then analyzed the data to see what pore size in the bones produced the clearest water and showed that small pore size meant cleaner water. Tina ground up bones into powder and used them as her filter.
Finally, she sent samples of her filtered water to the San Jose Water Company for testing, and they showed that her water reached drinkable standards. Tina then expanded her filters to use bones from pigs and sheep.
Beyond the Project
Tina is a competitive swimmer. “My swimming has taught me the determination it takes to achieve a goal, and I apply this knowledge to my other activities,” she says. She would like to be a physicist. “I like to understand why things move and behave the way they do,” she says. “For example, in Oobleck, the combination of water and cornstarch, the way it reacts with force is different from what we are used to because cornstarch has such a small particle size…Applied physics explains how these fascinating, fun and unknown or unpredictable substances behave.”
