Team:CLS CLSG UK/Implementation
Credit - Alvaro Reyes@unsplash
Proposed implementation
We believe that our project has great potential to improve the quality and safety of global aquatic ecosystems. We envisage that our modified bacteria and polyvinyl adhesion mechanism could be implemented mainly by water purification and regulation companies in major cities where cocaine pollution is the most significant. Having spoken to Thames Water, we know that the implementation of our systems is not only complementary to the current sewerage design but logistically viable. Under the assumption that the structural layout of other sewerage systems is similar to that of which we’ve seen with Thames Water, global outreach is a true possibility.
Our project will also appeal to conservation organisations as an end user as we have gained support from several people within this field whilst we performed our original human practices research. Andrew Kerr, Chair of the Sustainable Eel Group, was excited at the prospect of being able to eliminate this issue that the European Eel and several other aquatic organisms face and when contacting the London Zoo Marine and Freshwater Conservation group, they encouraged the study of the European Eel, stating that it is a vital organism and needs to be protected.
We hope that governments will use our systems to improve water quality in their major cities for the benefit of both the aquatic and human ecosystems. We believe that the principle of our project may be used as a basis to tackle many other harmful pollutants that aren’t removed via conventional purification methods in sewage treatment plants. By using the adhesion and kill switch circuits that we have designed and ‘swapping out’ the enzyme that is produced, a wider variety of pollutants can be targeted.
As a team, this is how we would want to implement our project into the real world ourselves. We would start by reaching out to further water purification companies, mainly in Europe, outlining our project idea, research and experimental and modelling data with the aim of gaining support across such organisations. We imagine this would be in the form of the promotion of our ideas to a larger base of organisations or even in the form of monetary donations. In order for the project to actually gain viability and recognition, resulting in social pressure for it to be implemented, we would contact parliament representatives in the UK to express our concerns surrounding cocaine pollution and its effect on aquatic life, using the European Eel as an example. Further, we would also contact representatives of the EU in a similar fashion so that the issue is recognised there as well. We believe that this approach would be effective as it can be brought up by supportive members of such parliaments under the banner of environmental protection: an already heavily supported matter. In this way we would be able to implement our project on a local, national, continental and even global scale.
Human practices safety
Whilst speaking to external organisations, some potential limitations were made apparent to us. Firstly, Thames Water suggested that it’s possible that the introduction of our own modified bacteria into the sewerage system could result in undesirable interactions with the already existing bacterial colonies in activated sludge. This could involve lateral gene transfer or just simply competition for available resources in the sewage. Our implementation of the hypoxia toxin-antitoxin kill switch would prevent lateral gene transfer between our recombinant bacteria and the bacteria in the sludge from, at least, becoming a widespread problem. This is because we intend to place all our circuits onto one recombinant plasmid. This means that if the recombinant plasmid is transferred the kill switch circuit would also be transferred and thus would kill the bacteria in the anoxic tanks further in the sewerage system. In terms of competition, we could actually not see this being too much of a hurdle as our bacteria would be adhered to our polyvinyl lamella clarifiers, so would only compete with other bacterial colonies in the event that the bacteria uncouple from the lamella.
In addition, we have not introduced any circuits which would give them a direct competitive advantage over other bacteria in terms of accessing resources or using them more efficiently and thus the main factor which would need to be accounted for would simply be how many resources would our colony use alongside the pre-existing use from others. Thus we would need to realistically investigate into an equilibrium point between having enough modified bacteria to significantly reduce cocaine concentration whilst not reducing available resources so much so that the efficiency of other bacteria in the activated sludge is undermined. Lastly, it could also be argued that the presence of our modified bacteria in the lamella clarifiers may even lead to a more efficient processing of wastewater as they could even perform similar functions to that of the sludge bacteria which would appeal to wastewater purification organisations.