Environmental Contamination Lab Report- Motor Oil

Group Members: Josh, Ryan and Hannah

Introduction

Our group designed an experiment based around several dosages of oil in a plant, and how drastic the rates of oil contamination can affect plant growth. The experiment was created in order to showcase the cause and effect of different levels of toxic interference on plant life.

In order to determine how oil concentration in a plant affects its ability to feed on nutrients and expand in size, we used various plants, each with a different concentration of oil inserted into it each day. We measured all the plants’ stages of growth each class period to see what changed and what stayed the same.

Our data was collected from a short period of observing the plants that grew in soil that was contaminated with different dosage amounts of oil onto. Once it was all collected in an organized chart, it serves as a representation of what an actual environment would look like closer to an industrial site containing large amounts of oil.

Materials

• Wheat seeds
• Plant containers
• Standard Motor Oil
• Flask
• Eyedropper

Results

The results of our experiments were quite surprising, given what we thought would happen. The 0% and 0.5% plants that contained motor oil grew as expected, but the 1% and above plants grew even more than expected. They were not hypothesised to grow significantly larger, or even grow at all.

Percent Concentration of Oil	Total Weight (Grams)	Average weight (grams)	Tallest plant (Cm)
3	0.6	0.2	7.7
2	0	0	0
1	1.5	0.14	6.7
0.5	2.5	0.17	8.4
0	2.4	1.71	9.6

Discussion

The 1% motor oil grew to over 12 cm and the 3% grew to almost 4 cm. This was very strange because our hypothesis stated that the 1% and above would not grow. The 3% oil grew more than the 2% oil. It is believed that there had been a human error in the 3% concentration. The problem with the experiment is that oil and water do not mix. This meant that the solution had to be mixed each time that the plants were watered. Since the mixture process has no way of being the same each time, some of the plants may have been watered with more or less than the intended amount of oil. This could be the reason that the 3% sample grew more than the 2% sample.

Conclusion

These results show that motor oil does have a significant effect on plant growth. For many kinds of plants, their growth would be significantly stunted by any contamination due to oil being injected into the ground on which they are rooted.

In a real life situation, an environment that was contaminated by oil would still thrive significantly depending on how much oil was contained in the soil, but based on our results, the plants would have a hard time growing. If enough oil was in the soil, the plants would no longer grow. More tests would have to be done to figure out the exact percentage.