Team:Jiangnan China/Education/Professional

• Project
  • Inspiration and Description
  • Proof of Concept
  • Implementation
• Dry Lab
  • Model
• Wet Lab
  • Parts
  • Engineering Success
  • Results
• Human Practices
  • Integrated Human Practices
  • Collaboration
  • Partnership
• Science Communication
• Team
  • Team members
  • Attribution
  • Notebook
• Future
  • Contribution
  • Prospect

click the axis again and back

We have to admit that we are so inexperienced compared with experts in every aspect of our project. To make our project more effective and pragmatic, we consulted detailed scientific information with experts from front-line teams, the government, universities and enterprises, hoping them to give us a hand.

Front-line Staff Interviews

We went to the cyanobacteria-scooping teams to have in-depth exchanges with workers. What we learned from the conversation with cyanobacteria-scooping team workers is that the government has invested over 100 billion RMB and thousands of workers in the last few years, but still can’t root out the cyanobacteria problem. The information we got strengthened and urged us to find a more cost-efficient way to fix the cyanobacteria bloom.

Government Association

Huishan Ecology and Environment Bureau (EEB) is the agency of Wuxi Ecology and Environment Bureau in Huishan District, which is responsible for the environmental management and supervision. Under the supervision of EEB, the local water department carries out a series of environmental protection actions focusing on cyanobacteria bloom which is a seasonal problem in Taihu Lake form April to October every year. Under the guidance of EEB, our team knows that what we need to do is fixing the problem of Cyanobacteria Gathering in a biological way considering the secondary pollution and costs.

Universities’ Connection

To help our team members know more about principles of environmental governance and the most popular approaches to reach the remediation of natural waters, Professor Zhou gave us a wonderful lecture. We discussed the method of application of sophorolipid and the factors which need to be considered when measuring the efficiency of degrading cyanobacteria. Via this fruitful communication with Jiangsu University, we preliminarily touched the application method of our product --- sophorolipid, and insisted our goal -- increasing its production to make it possible to be used in Taihu Lake.

Enterprises

According to the introduction by the company manager, sophorolipid has been used in some cleaning products including Ove Cleaner and mouth wash water. Jiangnan_China team members went to one location of the Evonik China, which is located at Shanghai chemical industry park.

Evonik is the first company in the world to use biotechnology to mass-produce high-quality surfactants. The first household cleaner containing Evonik's biosurfactant is already available in supermarkets. The product contains sophorolipids, which are naturally produced by Starmerella bombicola. The manager said that sophorolipid was a biosurfactant with better surfactivity and an eco-friendly and human-harmless product. We can make sure that our product is safe and an industrial production will be meaningful. Besides, we decided to ask for financial efforts from the government.