Catch Oil Polluters With Open Source Tools Using the Homebrew Oil Testing Kit

First time accepted submitter jywarren writes Ever wish you could investigate pollution yourself? Public Lab's recently announced open source kit aims to make it possible for anyone to become a "pollution detective" by comparing samples of oil contamination. Under the hood, the kit is pretty interesting. It uses the ultraviolet fluorescence caused by a Blu-Ray laser pen in oil samples, and includes a "papercraft" spectrometer to scan and classify oil types. The group's Kickstarter campaign is also seeking 50 early-access beta testers to help test and refine the kit before release.

Comments

Re: Is this a joke?

[Mathew_publiclab]

After the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the ERMA SCAT database--the official database-- was built by QUALITATIVE assessements of oil thickness on a 1-4 scale. A civic response with quantitative data collection tools could do better than "well, I think that looks like a 4." So yes. The responsible agencies are rarely capable of deploying enough trained people to actually cover the whole area with the types of expert methods people are mentioning in this thread, so more often than not they rely on estimates and other less-than-quantitative methodologies.