Team:Exeter/Notebook/June23
Tuesday, 23 June
Based on feedback from yesterday we voted to eliminate the biodegradable plastic idea, partly because we had not yet decided on a specific type of plastic we wanted to biodegrade; we were looking into several possibilities, including making a bacterial consortium capable of degrading multiple plastics. Due to lockdown in the UK we did not know how many weeks we would be able to spend in the lab, and testing the ability of bacteria to break down plastics might have taken too long.
We then informed our supervisors of this decision. They helped formulate some key questions which we needed to answer to decide between our final two ideas. These questions were 1. whether oil companies would be interested in using our desulphurisation technology and 2. whether it is legal in the EU to put genetically modified bacteria into concrete.