Team:UUlm/Human Practices

2020

A year full of crises, uncertainties, fears and worries. Natural disasters, political challenges and of course the global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic kept the world in suspense this year. The pandemic continues to pose a major social, medical and economic challenge in many regions of the world.
As a team that is participating in the iGEM competition for the very first time, the starting conditions were somewhat different compared to previous years. We had to adapt our project to the current situation because we were unable to complete our laboratory work. Thus, we decided to use human practices as an opportunity to study the global issue of plastic waste and how we currently cope with it. The following article documents the progress and efforts we have made within the iGEM framework.

Before the world's population was busy coping with the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, multiple environmental problems became increasingly popular at international scale. In particular, younger people began to demonstrate regularly for nature conservation and the protection of the environment. Humanity has been more than harsh with our planet in recent decades, with plastic waste in the environment being only one of the concerns. Global plastic production reached more than 6,300 metric tons in 2015, starting with 2 million tons in 1950[1]. The expiry time of plastics is long and they often end up in the environment mechanically crushed into microplastics. A significant part of plastics ends up in the oceans[2], where the plastic wastes become life-threatening traps for marine life[3],[4].
This makes the improvement of waste management systems across the world critical to reducing plastic pollution. This is where our approach in the iGEM competition comes into play. It is already known from several studies that some living beings are able to degrade different types of plastics. In our work we focused on the example of larvae of the beetle Tenebrio molitor that can break down polystyrene and use it as carbon source[5]!

In our research we soon realized that the reduction of plastic waste can be far more beneficial for the environment than any kind of waste disposal. Even with recycling and reusing materials, the fastest and most effective solution to the plastic waste problem would be to stop plastics production at all. However, this is highly unrealistic. As much negative aspects plastics have, they also offer enormous benefits for our society. We began to understand, that we would have to base our project on various pillars to explore as many aspects of the topic as possible.

Seven main pillars are the base of our Human Practices approach (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Seven pillars as base for our human practice.

In February and March of 2020, our focus was on contacting as many stakeholders as possible.

Waste managment

We have contacted several local waste management facilities and local recycling companies to learn more about the standard procedures of disposing plastics. We were able to get some insights about plastics waste management systems in Germany.

The company GEBR. BRAIG[6] (founded in 1966) offers a wide range of services, including municipal and commercial waste management.

The special waste/environmental consultant Alexander Eisele answered several of our questions. His point of view was, that separation of different wastes in Germany works very well and specific plastic wastes can be recycled quite successfully. Mixed plastics on the other hand are more difficult to recycle.

But even with our efforts in Germany to separate the waste before disposal, recyclable plastic can be sold and exported. The Greenpeace report: "A recycling Myth, Malaysia and the broken global recycling system" shows how European and international waste ends up in South East Asia and is often not processed there but burned.[7]

With the help of the stakeholders that we have contacted, we came to the conclusion that the waste management system is an area in which our approach can be implemented. For a closer look into this topic, please view Proposed Implementation. But we will come back to this as soon as our project is accessible to a wider audience. We also want to thoroughly research the decomposition of mixed plastics and focus more on this for our project design next year.

Plastics manufacturing

We also tried to contact PlasticsEurope[8] to discuss platic waste disposal, recycling, and export. Unfortunately, none of our inquiries were answered.

Public awareness

To integrate the public, we contacted local cities to learn more about their effort, regarding waste management, public awareness, and prevention of waste. We also planned to visit several schools, but due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic we instead prepared several short online lessons with respect to how synthetic biology can help to degrade polystyrene. To see the outcome of this topic, please visit our Education project. We also created several social media channels, where we constantly uploaded different topics related to our project.

As part of our research, we visited the unpackaged store „Klare Kante“[9] in Ulm and had the chance to interview one of the owners André Wieland regarding the impact each and every person can make in their every- day life to reduce packaging waste. This gave us a better insight into what can be done in the future to raise awareness in society.

The newly opened store „Klare Kante“ focuses on unpackaged everyday items and tries to motivate people to buy and live a sustainable and plastic-free life.

In this years participation, we had the chance to publish an article[10] about our project in a journal. We documented our approach and our general project idea in BIOspektrum[11], our article was published in September 2020.
Since then, we received two feedback e-mails from people showing interest in our project. We used this platform to educate the readers and to reach a more scientific audience.

Politics

When we initially investigated the topic, we came across a lot of information on the website of the German Federal Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt [12]). We got in touch with them but unfortunately we were not able to build up a collaboration yet.

Tourism

Plastics and waste in general entering the ecosystem is a problem linked with tourism. Overcrowded places and pollution in touristic areas lead to a great amount of plastic waste. To get a better understanding about the struggles and possible solutions, we were trying to contact hotels, bus- and train companies. As the consequences of the pandemic impacted the tourism industry heavily, we could not build a collaboration.

Non-governmental organisations

To learn more about the motivation and the difficulties regarding the much-needed changes in our society, we contacted several NGOs. We managed to arrange a skype call with our local GREENPEACE group in Ulm/ Neu- Ulm [13], where we had the chance to presented and discussed our project.

Greenpeace group Ulm/Neu-Ulm

The Greenpeace group Ulm/Neu- Ulm pointed out several issues, where we could further improve the implementation of our project. This led to us to consider, for example, a more sustainable approach to the mealworms. Thanks to their input, we fed the not used mealworms to chickens! We also were able to contribute to their newsletter by writing an article about our project, that was not published yet.

The LAKE CONSTANCE FOUNDATION [14] is a project-based foundation in Radolfzell, Germany. The foundation was founded in 1994 and since then has been working towards a more sustainable and responsible approach to Lake Constance and its surrounding areas. We have contacted the Lake Constance Foundation to learn more about a current project on nature and lake conservation.

The BLUE LAKES Project focuses on preventing and reducing the entry of microplastics into lakes. Therefore, the project wants to achieve a dialogue between water conservation experts as well as raise public awareness. The subjects of investigation of the project are Lake Constance and several other lakes in Italy over a period of four years. Furthermore, this project is a collaboration between several Italian partners and the Global Nature Fund[15] and is funded by the European Union. Based on these exchanges and the gathering of up to date information, the project aims to develop solutions for the increasingly important problem of pollution in lakes caused by microplastics.

We were able to interview Marion Hammerl, the managing director and program manager of the Blue Lakes Project. We had the opportunity to learn about their approaches, project management, research and difficulties they experienced during the pandemic.
We gained an insight into how important it is to spread awareness and public relations with respect to the plastic waste problem. To reduce microplastics in lakes and in general, a fundamental change in each and everybody’s lifestyle and in the dealing with plastics is needed.

The consequences of the pandemic included difficulties in contacting the experts of specific fields. Many of them were working in home office and were not available for our inquiries or had to deal with problems related to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Our initial plan for the Human Practices was to develop the mini video series “iGEM under water” to thoroughly educate the public an summarize all our findings in an entertaining and interesting way. We had already prepared and written nine short episodes that dealt with different perspectives on plastics in our society, based on our seven pillars. Over the months, however, we realized that our content was not enough to fill all the episodes of the series. So we decided to postpone the filming and production of the content until next year and to focus on microplastics in water this year.

To get some information about the water supply system in Germany, we had a facility and laboratory tour of the Langenau drinking water treatment plant (Landeswasserversorgung[16]), as well as a detailed conversation with the press spokesman Bernhard Röhrle. Mr. Röhrle answered all our questions about drinking water treatment and water purity in Germany. He explained the water sources of the Swabian Alb, where the city of our university is located, and showed us the different steps involved in water purification. During the facility tour, we saw the treatment plant operating in action. We also had the opportunity to discuss the microplastic content in drinking water and in the water of the ecosystem. For our miniseries, we recorded the interview and the tour of the facility, unfortunately we were not able to publish video material on social media yet, but we´re looking forward to creating new content for our channels.

Figure 2: Katharina Werner and Sophie Ostwald listening to Bernhard Röhrle at the ferric chloride water purification system.

Due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, only three of our team members had the chance to attend the facility tour. Of course, a precautionary distance of 1.5 m was always maintained.

Bernhard Röhrle, press spokesman of “Landeswasserversorgung Langenau”, explaining us the water purification step with activated charcoal.



All our researches and conversations with the Landeswasserversorgung and the Blue Lakes Project lead to the development of the following water cycle.

The water cycle "It all comes back"

The result of our interview with the Landeswasserversorgung os that right now, the detectable shar of mircoplastics in the drinking water is not at all that had to be concerned. The quality standart of our drinking water on the Sabian Alb is very high.

Wastewater treatment is a large part of the water cycle. Today, up to 96% of the wastewater produced is recycled[17]. If the rain cannot seep away, it is fed into the sewage treatment plant, together with wastewater from households. Since not all particles get out of the wastewater through filtration the water also goes through biological and chemichal cleaning steps.

However, it is worth to invest time and effort to develop solutions and decomposition systems as early as possible, so microplastics o the closed loop water systems will not become a problem in the future.

Water in the environment can be polluted with microplastics in various ways. In our conversation with the Blue Lakes Project, it became clear to us that microplastics can originate from cosmetic products, outdoor equipment, tire abrasion and other applications. The input into the ecosystem can be minimzed by minor changes of our lifestyle, therefore raisinf awarness in the public and initiating a dialogue is the best solution to address this problem. Through the interview with Marion Hammerl from the blue lakes project, we came to the conclusion that one goal of our project must be to raise public awareness.


This year, we could contact few experts to learn more about the different perspectives on the topic. We were also able to prepare some possible collaborations for our iGEM participation next year.
As a grand finale of the project we will then produce the miniseries "iGEM under water".

Many thanks to all who helped us to improve and develop our project!


References:
Get in contact: