Public Lab Launches New Initiative to Affordably Detect Pollutants with Open Hardware Tools

[Shannon Dosemagen]

Hi everyone,

Exciting news from the Public Lab nonprofit today! We're happy to announce that we've received a Knight Foundation Knight News Challenge grant to support the development of low cost, accessible pollution detection tools. 

Learn more about this initiative in the full grant description or view (and share!) the press release as a research note.

Best, Shannon

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NEWS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

January 14, 2014

Public Lab Launches New Initiative to Affordably Detect Pollutants with Open Hardware Tools

Public Lab’s Homebrew Sensing Project wins Knight News Challenge: Health 

New Orleans, LA -- The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science today announced the launch of the Homebrew Sensing Project, a new initiative to develop affordable and accessible pollution detection tools for communities in need. The project received $350,000 as a winner of the Knight News Challenge: Health, which funds ideas that harness the power of data and information for the health of communities. The innovation contest is an initiative of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Public Lab builds on two years of collaborative community technology development as well as a successful 2012 Kickstarter campaign which was backed by over 1,600 people, each of whom received a prototype spectrometer for open source chemical analysis. In the months since, Public Lab has engaged hundreds of volunteer contributors in the refinement of Do-It-Yourself methods for chemical detection, and collected over 15,000 submissions to its crowdsourced open database at SpectralWorkbench.org. In all, more than 3500 spectrometers have been distributed for less than $40 each. 

"Public awareness of environmental toxics and their effects has become a mainstream concern," said Jeffrey Warren, Research Director of Public Lab. "But affected communities -- especially those in need -- lack the information they need to take action." 

Through the News Challenge, Knight Foundation seeks breakthrough ideas that inform and engage communities. "The generous support of the Knight Foundation reflects their confidence that communities can successfully drive technological innovation to address the problems they face," said Shannon Dosemagen, Public Lab's President and Director of Partnerships and Outreach, "and this is especially true in the environmental space." 

“The winners of the Knight News Challenge: Health help emphasize the many ways in which citizens can use data to address community challenges,” said Michael Maness, Knight Foundation vice president of journalism and media innovation. “Homebrew Sensing Project does just that by targeting an important community problem and leveraging data and citizen collaboration to help fix it.” 

Prototype sensing devices attached to laptops and smartphones have already been used to measure crude oil contamination in soil and identify dyes in "free and clear" cleaning products. In the coming months, Public Lab will expand community events and launch pilot projects to develop new ways to monitor smokestack flares, nitrate contamination, and other pollutants, while promoting open data and growing the collaborative Public Lab community in order to tackle new challenges. 

About the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science

The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (Public Lab) is a community -- supported by a 501(c)3 non-profit -- which develops and applies open-source tools to environmental exploration and investigation. By democratizing inexpensive and accessible Do-It-Yourself techniques, Public Lab creates a collaborative network of practitioners who actively re-imagine the human relationship with the environment.

The core Public Lab program is focused on "civic science" in which we research open source hardware and software tools and methods to generate knowledge and share data about community environmental health. Our goal is to increase the ability of underserved communities to identify, redress, remediate, and create awareness and accountability around environmental concerns. Public Lab achieves this by providing online and offline training, education and support, and by focusing on locally-relevant outcomes that emphasize human capacity and understanding.

Since its founding during the 2010 BP oil disaster, Public Lab has launched a series of community-driven environmental technology projects, using a collaborative open source development process to rapidly innovate affordable tools to respond to and understand environmental threats. 

About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. We believe that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged.

 

Contacts

Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science: Jeffrey Yoo Warren, Research Director; phone: 504.358.0647; email: je...@publiclab.org

John S. and James L. Knight Foundation: Marc Fest, Vice President for Communications; phone:305.908.2677; email: Fe...@knightfoundation.org

[Alastair Leith]

Hi Shannon

Congratulations on the grant, great news!  It's really not clear to me reading the links what you intend to spend the money, other than software (web and mobile apps),s taff time and stuff in the community.

I've written on this list before about these things but this grant My interest stems from a long standing desire to build a low-cost air-pollution monitor for use around coal facilities and unconventional gas extraction operations.

Coal facilities would include mines, coal power stations, coal transport trains so I'm wanting to targeting particulate matter (PM) PM 2.5 (& PM 10 and PM 1) and gases in the atmosphere from combustion like NOx and SOx, CO etc.

For fracking operations I'm specifically interested in atmospheric methane concentrations. Various recent papers have identified the fugitive emissions from gas operations as meaning that burning methane for energy is as bad from a greenhouse gas (GHG) POV over 20 year timeframe as burning coal for energy.* While I'm aware that $60,000 mobile laser spectrometers can detect CO and CH4 it's not clear to me that the PL Spectrometer can detect 1-10 PPM CO or CH4 in air samples.

Safeacst recently developed a board of sensors for LA air polution detection and they are using low cost air detectors like those used in OH&S equipment. Their board doesn;t have the detectors I would like (PM, NOx, SOx, CH4, CO). I'm wondering if this grant will see a new air quality detector board with sensors? Every time I speak to activists fighting the rapid expansion of coal and gas projects in Australia there is great interest in citizen science that can log baselines for methane (measurements of CH4 prior to industrial activity to prove the delta in atmospheric methane) and that can measure PM and other nasties at primary schools near coal mines and power stations.

I'd like to work with PL on this but your existing methane detector didn't seem to leave the lab. I have undertakings from University researchers that they would be happy to field and lab test any citizen science detection devices to aid with calibration and accuracy assessment.

* Howarth et al, the Cornell Paper and more recent comprehensive atmospheric monitoring study

http://www.eeb.cornell.edu/howarth/web/Marcellus.html

http://www.eeb.cornell.edu/howarth/publications/Howarthetal2012_Final.pdf

Miller et al Anthropogenic emissions of methane in the United States

Alastair

Alastair I Leith

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[Jeffrey Warren]

Hi, Alistair - (bumping this to the main publiclaboratory list and the spectrometry lists)

Thanks for the note of support! We're certainly interested in detecting many of the same things, and welcome your collaboration!

> While I'm aware that $60,000 mobile laser spectrometers can detect CO and CH4 it's not clear to me that the PL Spectrometer can detect 1-10 PPM CO or CH4 in air samples.

I don't know that anyone's specifically attempted to detect those gases; I'd mentioned a laser-based CH4 detection device on the spectrometry list months ago, and I'd love to discuss how they accomplish this (what wavelengths, what kind of laser). That hasn't been one of our top targets with the spectrometry project (not least because it's not clear that this kind of spectrometer can be adapted to detect those things) but it doesn't mean we're not interested, just that we've chosen some specific contaminants which may be simpler to detect and yet still extremely important: poly-aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and heavy metals (lead, mercury) among them. Some have been more thoroughly explored than others, and the new initiative will focus on these as a starting point. 

A sensor board could be interesting -- assuming there is an affordable sensor module for detecting those contaminants. My feeling is that there are LOTS of sensor board projects, and a lot of work remains to actually detect specific contaminants and concentrations, as you point out. Surely if there are sensors for your targets, they could simply be integrated into existing boards -- the challenge seem to be on cheaply finding or building the sensors themselves. It would be great if there were an optical technique for this which could be built cheaply, DIY style. 

What methods do you think are robust and cheap for detecting methane? Do you think a spectrometric technique is viable at the sub-$100 price points we are going for at Public Lab?

Jeff

[Ben Cunningham]

Hi group, totally new here.

Alistair I know it has been almost 3 years that you posted about this but in case you're where this thread left off here is some info I have been gathering for similar citizen science resisting fossil fuel infrastructure development and proliferation. I work in Virginia, USA.

A US non-profit group called Earthworks has been lending their +$90,000 FLIR GasFinder 320 camera (and operator) to communities looking to visualize and measure VOCs, methane, and other pollutants for themselves across the us. The camera is a standard tool across the oil & gas industry for detecting leaks and can image a large number of oil & gas dev related chemicals in real time. Check their footage on youtube.

A group I am working with the show the dangers of a proposed natural gas pipeline compressor station (a HUGE one @ 57,000hp) is planning on purchasing a couple of Speck air monitors to measure PM2.5 inside and outside home nearby to the station. The Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project first did a compressor station health impact study using these monitors in 2014 for a much smaller facility (12,000hp) in Minisink, NY. We are following their study's design and will soon begin base-line testing; the compressor station is still seeking approval.

I also spoke with a researcher at the University of Virginia named Michael van den Bossche who recently released a study on low cost CH4 detectors. I believe they go by the name of Figaro. They are not plug-and-play ready yet, but can detect methane in 1-2ppm levels and cost under $100 I believe.

My own research has taken me to request use of Earthworks' Citizens Empowerment Project, where they lend out their technician and camera, and begun looking at hyperspectral satellite imagery from EO-1's (satellite) Hyperion toolset. The NASA Jet Propulsion Lab at California Institute of Tech has come out with a couple studies the past year showing some of the first successful imaging of methane from space, so there is hope! I now just need to figure out how to process the publicly-accessible images to show CH4 only.

Hope that helps anyone else looking for info on this topic!

Ben

Friends of Buckingham, VA