Chapter III
What have we done?
After we have appropriately redefined our challenge to focus more on the water quality, we set to gather as much information as we could about the state of water quality in USP. We turned to the Director of sustainability policies business administration Dr. Dorinne Raaimakers. She conveniently provided us with some Englsih translations of documents that are online available only in Dutch and even gave us a tour around the USP explaining the orders of waterlines and showing us where exactly they plan to execute some of their own ideas. These include a construction of natural ponds that would connect Oostbroek and Rijnauwen, which we will also provide a perspective on.
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However, we did not receive any sort of water quality data from the university. Their refusal is probably caused by the inconclusiveness of their already gathered data, which is understandable. But, we were not ready to give up and decided to do some testing on our own. We collected seven different samples from across USP and performed indicator tests for pH, general hardness, carbonate hardness and amounts of ammonia, nitrate, nitrite and phosphorus. Our results are gathered in the table.
The results we obtained were surprising, indicating that the water quality is nearly excellent, which is in contradiction with what the Green Office as well as other data sources have been telling us. We realised that the tests we performed are not conclusive. For example, we have not accounted for the amount of rainfall, temperatures, fertilisation etc. Besides that, measurements were only done one time, but should be repeated many more times for them to be claimed reliable.
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For this reason, we contacted the Water Board De Stichtse Rijnlanden in hopes that they could provide us with more data. And they did. We received data for 18 different locations around USP noting concentrations of much more compounds that we actually needed. On some locations, the data was complete for almost three years with measurements every month, while on other locations only two measurements have been done so far.
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We analysed the data and transformed them into graphs. We made 218 of them, but here we provide an example of only one. This is the graph of concentration of ammonia at one of the locations.
As evidently from this graph, the data from the water management are also quite unreliable. Besides the already before mentioned missing measurement for a lot of locations and compounds, there is also apparently no evident pattern to be observed in most of the graphs. A more detailed analysis can be found in one of the shared files, but the precise analysis we leave to experts that might tackle this challenge after us.
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For this reason, so inconclusive data, we decided that the first part of our prototype should be a proposal of a water testing plan to be carried out by the university.
