Kieron Monks - 16-year-old South African invents wonder material to fight drought
South Africa's worst drought in recorded history has left eight of the country's nine provinces in a state
of disaster, with thousands of communities and millions of households facing
water shortages.
The agricultural union
Agri SA has requested over $1 billion in government subsidies to help farmers
through the crisis, but a cut-price solution could soon be available -- from an
unlikely source.
Johannesburg
schoolgirl Kiara Nirghin, 16, recently won the Google
Science Fair's Community Impact Award for the Middle East and Africa
with her submission "No More Thirsty Crops."
Using orange peel and
avocado skins, the precocious student created a super absorbent polymer (SAP)
capable of storing reserves of water hundreds of times its own weight, forming
reservoirs that would allow farmers to maintain their crops at minimal cost.
The polymer has the added benefit of sustainability as it uses recycled and biodegradable
waste products.
"Kiara found an ideal material that
won't hurt the budget in simple orange peel, and through her research, she
created a way to turn it into soil-ready water storage with help from the
avocado," said Andrea Cohan, program leader of the Google Science Fair. She describes the
process as "trial and error," with a lot of experimentation before
alighting on the perfect formula.
"I started
researching what an SAP was, and what they all had in common was a chain
molecule polysaccharide," Nirghin recalls. "I found that orange peel
has 64% polysaccharide and also the gelling agent pectin, so I saw it as a good
(option). I used avocado skin due to the oil." The teenager combined
the skin and peel and left the mixture in the sun, where they reacted together
to form the powerfully absorbent polymer.
As a regional winner,
Nirghin has been assigned a mentor from Google to work with her on developing
the polymer, and hopes it could be tested in the field. She will soon discover
if she is one of the tech giant's sixteen global finalists. "If the idea was
commercialized and applied to real farms and real crops I definitely think the
impact that drought has on crops would be reduced," she says.
"I think it works,"
says Dr. Jinwen Zhang, a professor of materials engineering at Washington State
University, who is developing absorbent hydrogels to address drought.
"Using waste products for low-cost feedstock for large volume is
definitely worth further investigation."
The teenager, whose
hero is the Indian agricultural scientist M. S. Swaminathan, has many more
ideas, including a proposal to dye the skins of endangered animals to
discourage poaching. "I might look
into health sciences or engineering," she says of her future plans.
"Something so I can improve the world."
