Meet Satyam Thakur, 16-Year-Old Who's Solving India's Air Pollution Nightmare With Clay Pots

Satyam Thakur, a Class XI student living in Bangalore, has had it with India's pollution problem.

Unfortunately, he doesn't yet have the resources to develop a major solution for the problem. So instead, he's trying to make small changes one step at a time.

At the age of seven, he says, he went on a trip to Delhi with his family. He realised at the time that simply breathing was harder to do than usual. He had no idea why that was until, years later, India's capital was named the most polluted city in the world.

It was that realisation that sparked in him a drive to solve the country's air pollution problem. And he may have found a way for people to fix the problem themselves for really cheap.

Using clay pots.

Thakur realised during his research that chemicals present in clay pots make them good absorbers of particulate matter in pollutants. And since clay pots are so easily available, not to mention common in Indian households, it would be easy enough to repurpose them. With that in mind he designed a new, cheap filter made out of broken clay pots.

These filters can be fitted over the chimneys of manufacturing plants, vehicle exhausts and other common polluters, allowing them to absorb most of the pollution. After they, Thakur envisions the filters being converted into bricks for construction, or even reused after drying them and dusting off the pollutants harmlessly.

"Since clay pots are vital in most of the Indians' life, at times when these get old and get cracked they become unusable. Since these pots are cooked well before usage these do not break that easily," Thakur writes in his report.

"This filter is highly eco-friendly as and when after the absorption of the pollutants the filter could be converted into a brick causing no harm to the environment. I made use of the broken clay pots that purify the water and make it drinkable and this filter can also be used in several other polluting endings like the one in vehicles."

The amazing part is that, since Thakur is still studying in higher secondary school, all his research has been achieved with essentially zero funding. His tests of the filters were carried out in his school chemistry lab. However, he's so far only been able to test the filter as it absorbs pollutants from water and not air, mainly because he didn't have the resources to test the output "pure" air after. However, he has stated that the design is not just a prototype, he's actually managed to affix and it to and use it with a car's exhaust.

Thakur ran polluted water samples through the filter after testing them, finding them to contain 73.46 percent carbon dioxide and 26.54 percent particulate matter. After filtration however, that had gone down to just 0.06 particulate matter and 2 percent carbon dioxide. Essentially, they were better water filters than most sold on the market today, he writes.

Thakur has submitted his research as part of a Google initiative called 'Science Fair', which tasks teenagers with developing solutions to solve real-world problems with science, technology, engineering, and math. The Grand Prize winner will receive $50,000 in academic scholarship funding.

This year's competition saw thousands of entries from more than 100 countries, and Thakur is now among the final 100 candidates for the prize.