Science Communication and Education
With water pollution being a very serious problem that affects us humans and the environment we wanted to create a platform and be a source of information regarding the issue. Therefore, in collaboration with iGEM Team Tübingen, we decided to use Instagram to inform the public about water related problems and even offer some solutions. Working together in science communication made perfect sense since iGEM Team Tübingen is working on a riboswitch system for detecting heavy metal ions in ground water and our project LAC MAN focuses on purifying waste water from drug residues using immobilized Laccases.
Social media
As Instagram is one of the most used social media platforms and most of the young generation has an Instagram account we were hoping to reach youths and shed light on the given crisis. By posting short informative schemes and facts that were easy to read and remember we wanted to catch the audience's attention without bombarding them with too much information or text and just awaken their interest in the topic. After illustrating the water body types and their differences we dove into the topic of water pollution both globally and locally in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg. Alongside some interesting facts that would portray the magnitude of the water pollution crisis we tried to motivate them to take initiative and be more mindful of their behaviour, for example by properly disposing pharmaceuticals or reducing their single use plastic consumption.
Many say that since water pollution is mainly caused by industrial waste and that the change has to come from big corporations an individual has no impact on this issue. With our weekly posts we wanted to show that by taking initiative and for example refusing to buy single use plastics or products with microplastics even a group of individuals can pressure big corporations into changing their ways. We hope we were able to send this message across and inform the public of the current crisis and the impact they can have to solve it. For more information visit our Instagram page igem_stuttgart or the instagram page of iGEM Tübingen.