Of the salmon-killing tire chemical her sponge removed from water in testing.
In the urban streams around Puget Sound, something has been killing the salmon. Up to 80 percent of adult coho salmon in some streams die before they can spawn, poisoned by 6PPD-quinone, a chemical that washes off car tires and into the water. Lakshmi Agrawal, an 18-year-old from Bellevue, Washington, decided to do something about it.
She built the fix in a lab. Agrawal created sponge-like filters out of jute plant waste that, in testing, removed up to 80 percent of the tire pollutant from water. They also catch other heavy metals, break down naturally in the environment, and, compared to existing options, take 85 percent less energy to make and cost about 98 percent less.
It won big. Her project earned the Regeneron Young Scientist Award of 75,000 dollars at the international science fair, one of the top honors a young scientist can receive. A high schooler built a cheaper, cleaner solution to a problem that had stumped a whole region.
"A teenager built a 98 percent cheaper fix for the chemical killing the salmon."
The lesson is not that she is a genius, though she is. It is that she looked at a problem everyone had accepted as unsolvable, a dying species and an invisible chemical, and treated it as something a person could actually fix. Most adults would have called that above their pay grade.
This is the builder instinct ANF keeps spotlighting. Pick the problem everyone wrote off, and go build the fix, even in a high school lab.
The salmon were dying. An 18-year-old built the sponge to save them.