DIGOS CITY, Davao del Sur-The country is now developing its own combat prowess against emerging pollutants, particularly invasive microplastics, as well as evolving contaminants, as researchers at this state university have installed key gadgets and technology to protect humans and the environment.
Professor Kris Kristofferson T. Tan, head of Mathematics and Arts and Sciences at Davao del Sur State College (DSSC), showed the BusinessMirror on Thursday the machines and gadgets acquired from Japan to establish Mindanao’s 16th laboratory in the network funded and supported by the Department of Science and Technology (DOST).
Inside the Research Center for Emerging Pollutants (RCEP) were the Microplastic Automated Preparatory Device, the first of its kind in the country that extracts, collects and filters water sample the volume equal to glass of water; the Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrophotometer, or FTIR, which identifies the sampled pollutants from its own library of organic molecules; and the Ultra-Low Freezer, which can turn in as low as 80 degrees below zero degree to preserve biological samples.
All were recently acquired from the DOST fund of P5 million that also signified its approval to the RCEP.
Tan said the laboratory has been the product of the research work put up by his staff with multidisciplinary talents, including one chemist, two biologists with postgraduate expertise in microbiology and microplastics.
DOST Regional Director Anthony Sales, who also sits in the board of directors of the DSSC and in the board of other state universities and colleges in the Davao Region, has assured Tan that the RCEP will expect three plantilla positions for researchers.
Tan said the RCEP was developed from the array of suggested environmental issues to develop a science laboratory, and said the pestering and unaddressed environment pollution and contamination led him and his team to confront the issue.
He said the province, as well as the entire Davao Region, has its decades-long grapple with improper disposal of wastes from commercial agriculture, mining and urban and rural industrial operations. ‘Their disposal had river beds and sea floors contaminated with mercury, arsenic and other heavy metals. Even that simple but definitely destructive disposal of batteries contaminates the environment with lead,’ Tan said.
‘This laboratory here is actually against emerging pollutants, like the microplastic pervasive intrusion into the water and marine life ecosystem, and the evolving contaminants, like bacterial and heavy metal contamination of the environment,’ he said.
Engineer Niñaliza Escorial, deputy executive director of the DOST-Philippine Council for Industry, Energy, and Emerging Technology Research and Development (PCIEERD) told via online the opening of the RCEP that the laboratory becomes significant in the middle of disturbing findings that 16 of the 25 drinking water sources of Davao del Sur show coliform bacteria contamination and all the sources failed the microbiological testing.
She said that the Digos River also contained cadmium and chromium levels that exceeded tolerable level, and microplastics were detected int eh marine gastropods in the mangrove system of neighboring Santa Cruz.
This means, he said, that this laboratory ‘is not only for this province but for the entire region.’
Dr. Ruby Raterta, chief of PCIEERD’s Human Resources and Institutional Development, said the RCEP is the latest addition to the 70 DOST-supported science laboratories in the country and the first Institution Development Program of DOST on emerging pollutants.
‘We hope that this laboratory will produce bigger research projects,’ she said.
Sales said the RCEP ‘is a crucial development in advancing science in the area’ and talked with Tan to have a possible profiling of bottled water that were being marketed and manufactured in the region ‘because it has been a wider knowledge now that even drinking water contains microplastics, which have also invaded the food and water chain’.
‘Let the RCEP be the beacon of scientific inquiry,’ Sales said.
Escorial urged the DSSC to work with the local governments, the water district, environmental agencies, schools and the communities.