After the recent breaking news of GenX and other contaminants in our area’s drinking water supply, one group of students at a local middle school has decided to get involved in finding a solution. The Leland Middle School Robotics Team has begun to prepare for their regional competition. This year’s theme is “hydrodynamics” and will task the students with identifying a problem within the human water cycle and then designing a solution that resolves the problem.            

           The team began their research with a presentation from Brunswick Regional Water and Sewer H2GO’s Executive Director Bob Walker. Walker presented to the students about what GenX is and the state of our river. In his presentation, he provided the students with the chemical makeup of GenX as well as ways to remove the chemical from water. Sarah Anderson, an 8^th grade science teacher and the advisor for the robotics team, said that the team is in the beginning stages of their project but have plans to build their own small-scale reverse osmosis (RO) system for the competition.            

           H2GO will continue to work with the robotics team to provide insight and guidance as they embark on building an RO unit. The plans are to have water tested pretreatment and post treatment to present to judges the results of the RO treatment process.