Integrated Human Practice

This year, according to the project requirements, we have completed different HP in terms of knowledge popularization, publicity, social research, cooperation and other aspects, so that our project can keep moving forward. Here is our summary of HP at various stages of the project. For more information, you can click on the navigation bar at the top or the title above the clock below.

1.Inspirations

After visiting the express delivery points and resource recycling stations around our campus, we concluded that thousands of waste cartons were consumed without well recycling in China every year. Through the questionnaire survey, we know that most people throw away the abandoned express boxes directly. In this project, we hope to solve the problem of resources waste by synthetic biology. Last year, we harnessed the chemical methods for the pretreatment of waste carton materials. This year, we improved our strategy by utilization of strains that expressed cellulases for the pretreatment.

With the development of science and technology, people are better pursuing the concept of environmental protection. In the context of the decreasing of fossil energy, we hope to convert waste express boxes into biomass energy such as isobutanol – by synthetic biology methods. On the other hand, the biodegradable biomass plastics (PHB) has been used instead of the traditional plastic products, showing great potential for solving the problem of white wastes. Thus, we design anther routine of our project to convert the express cartons into PHB plastic.

Furthermore, we hope to enhance people's environmental awareness and popularize synthetic biology to public. Therefore, we gave lectures to the freshmen of our college and primary school students in our city, hoping to make them truly understand the great subject of the 21st century --synthetic biology and build up environmental awareness.

2. Strategies

Questionnaire survey - looking for questions

Visit and investigation - finding problems

Experiment and education- trouble shooting

3. Learnings

Through HP, we better understand the goal of our project, that is saving the resources and promoting biological recycling. In addition, we learned from the businessman and government officials that the fields of biomass energy and biomass plastics in China are rapidly developing. However, the issues still need to be resolved, including the cost of techniques and people’s lack of awareness of environmental protection.

4. Troubles

During the questionnaire survey, we found that people lack knowledge about biomass energy and biomass plastics, leading to us to help them fill the questionnaire step by step. Additionally, we got in trouble when interviewed the people working in the bio-recycle filed, wasting time a bit.

5.Wishes

This cannot do without our hope that the world will become a better place. Protecting the environment and saving energy is the responsibility of everyone. Synthetic biology, as a subject full of vigor and vitality, should bring us infinite possibilities.