Approximately one hundred fifty Newark eighth graders learned more October 25th about the value of clean water than perhaps they’d ever known before.

That’s because three Xylem Inc. employees from Seneca Falls made a Clean Water Awareness Day presentation to the students based on their global company’s voluntary philanthropic Watermark Education Program.

Xylem, which employs about 17,000 people in 50 counties, makes residential and commercial products and systems that transport, treat and monitor water.

 Throughout the school day, Jill Boudreau, Residential Water Product Manager, Americas, narrated a compelling power point presentation to students in all eight of Todd Heinzman and Jarrad Bouchey’s technology classes. 

She was assisted by Julie Falsey, who provides technical support in customer service for Xylem and Derrick Oberdorf, one of Heinzman’s former students who is a Xylem Assistant Product Manager for Boosters, Americas. 

They all helped students test a water sample for turbidity, pH, dissolved oxygen and temperature and made a homemade water filter.

In a nutshell, students learned:

• Water covers about 70 percent of the earth’s surface and only about 1 percent is suitable for drinking. And of that 1 percent, 99 percent of it is stored beneath the surface of the earth as groundwater.

• The average person in the U.S. uses about 80 to 100 gallons of water a day, yet there are still places in the U.S. _ or about 1.6 million people _ that don’t have running water.

• What the water cycle is, and where water they drink in Newark comes from.

• How clean water is produced in nature or by manmade filtration systems.

• Typically 2 gallons of water are used when people brush our teeth; 2-7 gallons are used to flush a toilet; 20 gallons are used to hand wash dishes;150 gallons are used to take a car through a car wash; 1,800 gallons are used in the manufacture of a single pair of blue jean;s and 39,090 gallons are needed in the manufacture of a new car.

 • That water can be conserved by using such simple measures as running the dishwasher and washing machine only when full; by taking shorter showers; turning off the water while brushing your teeth; making sure faucets don’t drip; and using rainwater to water plants

Heinzman, who arranged for the Xylem Watermark presentation at the school, said it was a great experience for the students. He was happy to hear later from several of them that they used the homemade water filters they’d made in class to filter such things as “Gatorade” or mud puddle water and they became clear.

As students were making the filters using plastic water bottles and other easily obtainable materials including gravel or small stones, clean sand, activated charcoal, cotton balls, a small clean cloth or a coffee filter and some clean gardening soil, Boudreau explained they only served to demonstrate how impurities are removed from water though the natural filtration in the earth or by manmade filtration systems.

And what did eighth graders learn from the presentation? Here are the observations of two students.

Chloe Kraus said, “I enjoyed learning how much water it takes to make objects that we use everyday.”

 Ben Bryan said, “I was surprised at the number of people who get sick or die because they don’t have clean drinking water.”