By the time Kalliope Gonos stood in front of water industry professionals at the Water and Wastewater Equipment Manufacturers Association forum this spring, her project had evolved well beyond a classroom chemistry assignment.
What began as a sophomore honors chemistry science fair requirement had turned into something much closer to an applied remediation study: a comparative analysis of oil spill absorbents, deployment costs, material reuse, and cleanup efficiency.
At the center of the project was what she calls the “Salvinia Sponge,” a silicone sponge treated with wax nanocuticles extracted from Salvinia minima, a floating aquatic plant also known as water spangles.
“I realized the issue isn’t that we don’t have the materials or the resources to clean these [spills],” Gonos said during an interview with Water Daily. “The issue is it is egregiously expensive.”
That framing ultimately shaped the entire project.
Rather than asking which material absorbed the most oil, she focused on a more operational question: which remediation approach was most cost effective once deployment realities were considered.
That distinction pushed the work beyond a standard science fair experiment and into the kinds of tradeoffs utility leaders, engineers, and environmental responders confront regularly.
Designing the Salvinia Sponge
The concept centered on the natural hydrophobic properties of Salvinia minima, an aquatic plant commonly used in aquariums that develops wax nanocuticles on the surface of its leaves.
The plant itself appealed to her partly because of its growth characteristics.
“It grows really, really quickly,” she said. “That was actually a bonus for me because I wanted something that would be really self-renewable.”
Using a silicone sponge substrate similar to a makeup sponge, she dissolved and recrystallized the plant’s wax coating into the sponge material in an effort to minimize water absorption while maximizing oil absorption.
Ultimately, the sponge absorbed “a little bit over seven times its weight in oil while absorbing minimal amounts of water,” according to her testing.
The project focused primarily on lighter surface oils including diesel and petroleum products, rather than heavier crude oils that sink below the surface.
“There aren’t really absorbents for that,” she said of submerged crude oil contamination. “You often have to use harmful chemical dispersants.”
Future iterations of the project may explore whether similar materials could eventually work on heavier oils as well.
Testing cost against performance
The most sophisticated part of the project was not necessarily the material itself, but the way Gonos structured the evaluation process around operational tradeoffs.
She compared the Salvinia Sponge against two lower cost remediation materials already discussed in some cleanup circles: cat hair mats and peat moss.
Cat hair, she explained, has attracted attention because its porous structure can absorb oil and can be woven into mats using donated material from pet groomers and salons.
But both cat hair and peat moss encountered the same problem during testing. “They just absorbed a lot of the water,” she said.
Peat moss introduced another concern. Once dispersed, it could become difficult to fully recover from sensitive ecosystems.
“It could be harmful for delicate ecosystems,” she said, referencing areas such as coral reefs or habitats containing endangered species.
She also tested each material with and without containment booms.
The booms improved oil collection performance by concentrating the oil into smaller areas, but they also introduced significant cost increases.
“The booms were really helpful,” she said. “They increased the amount of oil that was able to be absorbed.”
But once the economics were incorporated into the analysis, the picture changed. “You have to think about it," she said, "is it worth the price tradeoff when you really could just use one more sponge and it would cost less than having these booms?”
That conclusion became one of the clearest examples of the project’s systems-level thinking.
Rather than optimizing only for technical performance, the project evaluated remediation methods the way infrastructure and environmental operators often must: balancing effectiveness against cost, scalability, logistics, and environmental impact.
Looking beyond major oil spills
The project was partially inspired by catastrophic spill imagery she remembered from childhood television commercials showing wildlife affected by oil contamination.
But during the research process, her understanding of the issue expanded considerably.
“I wouldn’t say these huge oil spills are happening really, really frequently,” she said. “But there’s constantly small oil spills in little creeks that happen to get into larger areas.”
Living near the Chesapeake Bay watershed helped shape that perspective.
“All of those oil-based lawn products can leave light oils on the top,” she said. “Even these tiny little ponds or creeks have a greater impact ultimately to everything that’s around it.”
That watershed-oriented framing aligns closely with how many utilities and environmental agencies increasingly approach contamination risk: not only through catastrophic events, but through cumulative smaller scale pollution across interconnected waterways.
From science fair to WWEMA
The project’s path into the water industry itself was largely driven by initiative and follow through.
Gonos first entered the project into her school science fair, where it won first place in its category and advanced to a regional competition. There, she received an honorable mention connected to a federal water quality organization and met industry contacts who encouraged her to continue presenting the work.
“I reached out to everyone I had gotten business cards from,” she said.
One of those contacts eventually connected her with the WWEMA forum.
“There was quite a bit of luck involved actually,” she said. “But I took the card, I brought my trifold, I showed up and I did my little presentation.”
The experience also reshaped her own academic interests.
At the start of the year, she had been considering psychology as a career path. After months spent researching material chemistry, hydrophobic compounds, and remediation performance, her interests shifted toward chemistry and biochemistry.
“I realized I actually have a lot of interest in chemistry,” she said. Now, she is already outlining future research projects involving preservatives, metabolic impacts, and biochemistry while continuing to contact universities about laboratory access and research equipment.
A different kind of talent pipeline
For the water industry audience at WWEMA, the significance of the project extended beyond the sponge itself.
What stood out was how quickly the research evolved into the kinds of questions environmental professionals deal with every day:
- material performance
- deployment cost
- operational practicality
- reuse potential
- ecosystem recovery
- and scalability
In many ways, the project became less about a single absorbent material and more about how emerging researchers learn to think through infrastructure and environmental problems.
By the time the project reached WWEMA, it was no longer simply a classroom experiment. It was an early example of systems thinking applied to water and environmental remediation.
