Water, Water Everywhere

There's a store in town called “Kaufland”, which is very appropriately named because it means “Buyland”. The store's contents follow a similar theme as Meijer, with everything from bikes and yarn to movies and food. What makes this store amazing and noteworthy is it's dedication to drinks: an entire level of the building is filled with juices, sodas, carbonated water, beer, and a vast variety of alcoholic drinks! I went down to this room to get a bottle of orange juice and found myself in what felt like a storage room. Seeing all of those bottles of 'flavored water' reminded me of something that was recently brought to my attention: soda companies, like Coca-Cola, use a lot of water in the manufacturing of their products. And, since they use so much water, they are trying to develop practices in which they waste as little as possible. As I stood in that huge basement filled with thousands of 1 liter bottles of what is basically water, I was overwhelmed at how much water is put into the drink industry.

I think that my activities in the lab this week are best described by my notes on the photos from the lab. A quick summary of my daily activities would be as follows: Monday was sieving, Tuesday was soil color identifying, Wednesday was weighing samples and making aluminum foil bombs in preparation for Carbon-Nitrogen analysis, Thursday was weighing to prepare for measuring PH and actually measuring PH, and Friday was more measuring of PH.

I have gotten to know the other students who are working on soil analysis projects and the lab manager a bit this week and they are all very nice and friendly. A good group of people to be around. Having done a little bit of work in each of the rooms in the lab, I am becoming comfortable and at home. Something that truly amazes me about the lab is how clean it is. Everyone in there is working with soil samples, which you'd think would make a terrible mess, but with sieving being done in a separate room, the lab itself is very clean. The sieving is done in a separate room from the lab because it does cause so much dust in the air and gets everything dirty, which isn't good for the pricey analysis machines in the lab. But outside of extreme dust conditions, it feels like the tabletops should be a little grimy or the floor a little rough from spilled soil, but it's all clean enough to eat off of (not that I would recommend it since chemicals are used in the lab). Everyone is very neat and tidy, which keeps the place in tip-top shape.