Team:SIS Korea/IntegratedHumanPractices
Integrated Human Practices
One major priority of our project was figuring out the most efficient conditions for utilizing our bacteria. We knew that there were major efforts already being made in combating the relatively well-known plastic epidemic, and thus it was necessary to exploit our bacteria’s unique strengths to the fullest extent to show its usefulness when implemented in real-life situations.
A major effort we took in order to achieve this was asking professionals with long-time experience in the same field. Through their advice, we learned how to best utilize our product and focus our project in a more productive and realistic direction.
At first, we intended to test/improve our prototype’s effectiveness in saltwater. If we could create a bacteria effective in saltwater, we could utilize it within the ocean, which is home to large amounts of plastic and thus a major target of the problem we intended to solve. We did have a vague concern though, as we did know that E.Coli would not fare well in saltwater due to the salinity and the various complexities it brings such as issues of cell osmolarity.
However, Dr. Weber, a professional who we have interviewed at the time, had already tried to experiment with this notion for years and was unsuccessful in creating an E.Coli like such. So, we decided to shift our focus from creating salt-resistant bacteria and changed our setting to freshwater and land and continued our experiment on a media of pH 6.6, which was the best environment for the E.Coli to grow.
“With salt crystal[s], we just dry it [to look at its structure], but with proteins, it is not so easy because proteins still need water around them or they will collapse and lose their structure.” Dr. Gert Weber
Our next interviewee, Dr. Manfred Weiss provided us with a new concern and warned against the use of our bacteria in the real world; he stated that the implementation of our product could lead to dire environmental problems simply due to its novelty. We assured him by saying that we weren’t just about to dump our product in the real world, as we were also unsure of the consequences it would bring but would test them in a media where we could control and observe the bacteria’s growth. At the same time, it made us wonder how we were going to make our product, after it is fully developed and safe for use, become a wide-spread solution. With even the experts saying that making it a business would be an unreachable goal, we could not even imagine what the public’s response would be towards our product. Thus, we set out to convince the public about the severity of the plastic crisis and the need for innovative solutions. Dr. Weiss had influenced us to hold campaigns and education sessions to convince the public.
“This gives a belly-ache to scientists; we don’t want to release artificial organisms into the wild.” Dr. Manfred Weiss
After our general understanding and frame of the experiment were fully determined we needed to grow a deeper understanding of the general public. This was further grown through our sticker poster which got a brief understanding of the knowledge that people have about annual plastic usage per capita. We gave environment-friendly corn-derived straws to whoever made a guess at the sticker board. After a week into the campaign, we collected and summed up the tallies on the sticker board; through the sticker chart, we were able to realize that not many people thought that 76 kg of plastic was the correct answer, rather thinking that each individual consumed 114 kg of plastic every year. Moreover, we observed that not many people had even an approximate number in their minds. They simply made the assumption that we would be consuming as much plastic as possible. With students who are not even interested in the plastic epidemic itself, our most dire goal would be to educate these students. Thus, we did exactly this and went to our school’s middle school and elementary school to hold sessions on plastic usage and ways to recycle.
Our education followed, after we received sufficient information from the surveys and campaigns we utilized such data to specify exactly what things were crucial for us to teach. For the middle school, we were significantly more detailed than the other two groups as they were capable of grasping the difficult concepts our project may present. Our education was a good reflection of exactly what knowledge we had been able to gain up to that point from our education, interviews, and surveys.
Final Focus
Our processes developed over time in a logical and timely manner in which we were able to utilize our knowledge to create an effective and strong response to the plastic epidemic. Our human practices integrated both biology and researches to develop a full and comprehensive understanding of the problem in society today.
References
Jordan, Rob. “Do Plastic Straws Really Make a Difference?” Stanford Earth, 18 Sept. 2018, earth.stanford.edu/news/do-plastic-straws-really-make-difference#gs.anptnl.
“Can Paper Coffee Cups Be Sustainable?” World Centric, www.worldcentric.com/notree/.