Toronto students invention aims to solve lead in water issue

The Royal Flush can automatically flush water from taps every 30 minutes to keep lead levels low.

Thestar.com
Ainslie Cruickshank
Dec. 21, 2017

A team of brainy elementary school students in Toronto has invented a device that could help address high lead levels in drinking water at schools and daycares across the province.

They call themselves The Walking Lead. They’re Glen Ames Senior Public School’s robotics team and in January they’re taking their invention -- The Royal Flush -- to the eastern Ontario championships, a major milestone for the team in the annual First Lego League robotics competition.

The minds behind the invention -- a group of Grade 8 students and one Grade 7 -- were inspired to tackle the issue after the Star found more than 640 schools and daycares across Ontario failed to meet the provincial standard for lead in 2015 and 2016.

Glen Ames was one of them.

The Royal Flush automatically flushes stale water from a tap every 30 minutes aiming to keep lead concentrations low throughout the school day.

“The difference between ours and other flushers is most of them are based on time, but ours is on temperature and we think that is more accurate,” said Colin King, the team’s captain.

“With temperature when we know the water is as cold as possible we know there’s new water coming in from outside so it’s water that hasn’t been sitting in the pipes for a long time,” he said.

The province’s standard for lead in drinking water is 10 parts per billion. Though far from the worst offender, Glen Ames found lead levels of 15 ppb in a 2016 water sample taken from a tap that hadn’t been used in several hours. Samples taken after the tap had been flushed were below the provincial standard.

In a statement the Toronto District School Board said Glen Ames now flushes all drinking water fixtures on a daily basis as required by provincial regulations. “Of note, all results for the 2017 test period have seen no lead exceedances in drinking water fixtures at this school,” it said.

Health bodies like the World Health Organization and American Academy of Pediatrics agree there is no safe level of lead exposure.

“It was kind of shocking because they didn’t even tell us anything even though lead is pretty bad for you and can also lower your IQ,” said Elsa Bienenstock, a Grade 8 student and member of The Walking Lead team.

It did, however, give the team an idea for the real world problem they would set out to solve for this year’s First Lego League competition. The theme was hydro dynamics and teams were asked to identify an issue within the “human water cycle.”

Last year’s team placed second at the eastern Ontario championships and qualified for the North American Open in California.

“It’s a really good way for students who are passionate about science and technology to learn about team work,” said Luke Martin, the team’s coach and an information and technology teacher at the school.

“Regardless of how they place, it’s the memories that really matter and the experience,” he said.

Young children, who can absorb four to five times more ingested lead than adults, are particularly vulnerable according to the World Health Organization, which notes that at lower levels of lead exposure previously considered safe, lead can affect children’s brain development and result in lower IQ scores.

While Ontario is doing more to address lead in water at schools and daycares than most other jurisdictions in North America, experts say flushing -- the main response to high lead levels -- isn’t a long term solution.

Lead levels can build back up within 30 minutes after taps are flushed, Bruce Lanphear, a Simon Fraser University health sciences professor and expert in the effects of toxins in children, has previously told the Star.

The Walking Lead sought to solve that problem with the Royal Flush, which automatically flushes the taps every 30 minutes.

The team tested water from the tap in the school’s IT lab and found lead levels of 30 ppb -- twice the level of the failed sample taken from the school in 2016. After flushing the tap with the Royal Flush for 5 minutes lead levels were reduced by 99.3 per cent, to 0.167 ppb.

Now they’re waiting for the results of samples taken randomly throughout the day to see how it’s affecting lead levels at other taps on the same plumbing line.

For the First Lego League competition, the team built the body of the device using Lego, an EZ touchless faucet and programmed a Lego Mindstorm EV3 to control it. It cost between $450 and $500 to build, but they’re investigating other materials to lower the cost.

When the program is turned on a motorized Lego arm moves towards the tap and sets off the motion detector, which then turns the tap on and flushes the water for a minute at a time, explained Reed Watson, a member of the team focused on innovative solutions.

The device will repeat this process five times for the first flush of the day so the water is flushed for a total of five minutes, then it measures the temperature of the water.

For the rest of the day, the Royal Flush will flush the taps every 30 minutes. After the first one minute flush, it takes the temperature. When the water is no more than 2 degrees C higher than the temperature it registered that morning it signals that new water is in the pipes and it can stop flushing.

“We know that since that new water is coming in it hasn’t been sitting in the pipes so it hasn’t been accumulating lead,” King explained, adding “we’re wasting the minimum amount of water possible to get the lead out of the water.”

Eventually The Walking Lead hope to get the Royal Flush into other schools that may still have issues with lead in their plumbing.

The team has already taken their device to conferences and spoken to experts for feedback. They even reached out to the hosts of TVO’s The Water Brothers, a documentary series that explores the world’s water issues.

“We were really impressed with the students and their knowledge and their passion and desire to come up with solutions to … this one particular challenge,” said Tyler Mifflin, one of the program’s co-hosts, adding that “their teacher was really a fantastic teacher.”

“It’s an issue that needs more attention because if there’s anywhere where there should not be lead in water, it’s schools,” his brother and co-host Alex added.

Lanphear, the health expert from Simon Fraser, agreed “it is a really innovative short term solution.”

Over the long term though, he said the best option is still to identify the sources of lead and remove them.