Education and Engagement

Summary

Western Canada undertook three projects for our public engagement and education portion of our project. Each project reflects a different approach to influencing how emerging contaminants in water are perceived, regulated and acknowledged outside of a research setting.

1. Letter to the City Campaign- With no legislation in place to regulate the rising levels of emerging contaminants, Western Canada set precedent for Canadian Municipalities by accomplishing municipal government policy reform for wastewater regulations in the City of London. We hope our documented experience aids future iGEM teams to follow suit.

2. Health Product Stewardship Association Educational Tool- Wastewater contamination at the individual level is something our team felt strongly to educate the public about. Students and households’ daily activities can contribute to wastewater pollution, something even our team members were unaware of at the beginning of our project. This realization led us to partner with the HPSA to create an online educational tool to gain valuable information for the HPSA future work.

3. Stakeholder Podcast Series- Wastewater management is not a particularly riveting topic to the general public. We wanted to provide information about the wastewater industry in an easy to understand format, resulting in a podcast series.

Letter to the City Campaign

Special Prize Best Public Engagement & Education

Why a letter campaign?

Through the human practices team initial literature searches and brainstorming meetings, it became evident there was a knowledge gap between what is being completed in the lab on wastewater properties and emerging contaminants versus what the state of wastewater effluent regulations and policymaking currently is. Within the past few years, there has been a growing library of publications about emerging contaminants rising in Canadian bodies of water and their potential detrimental effects to aquatic life and human health¹. This is great, but very few new policies or regulations have been put in place to run parallel to these new discoveries. Without the structural policies in place to start regulating emerging contaminants, even the solutions and work being completed within our own wet lab would never be able to be implemented. To our team, there was also a lack in the Canadian government's efforts to convey and inform the public about the current state of wastewater, and what the future holds.

For these reasons our HP team started the letter campaign to go straight to the source of where we think change and recognition on wastewater regulations will be valuable. As our team portrayed the rise of emerging contaminants as an “invisible impending doom”, it was our goal with this project was to gain enough political recognition to start discussions within policy board rooms about why and how emerging contaminants should be regulated, and how to keep the public informed.

Contents of the Letter

We composed a letter of concise summaries regarding our concerns on the allocated resources within the municipality being used to regulate emerging contaminants in wastewater. The letter contains:

- Highlight of Environment of Canada’s recent published report outlining concerns of the current lack of Canadian wastewater regulations.

- Policy recommendations: suggesting revised versions of current policies in testing techniques/frequencies for emerging contaminants, mainly pushing for pharmaceuticals and personal care products testing in the Thames river.

- Public education suggestions: reminding the City of it’s duty to consult and inform the public on issues that can be potentially harmful at the individual level. We suggest things such as adding info pages to specific already existing initiatives on the City of London’s Website that is publicly accessible.

The full letter can be seen here.

Approaching the Leaders of Our Society

In the perfect world our HP team would call up the Prime Minister, have a lengthy discussion about the need for policy change regarding EC’s, and new legislation would be enacted immediately. In reality, trying to contact and gain political support for a cause is hard. After reading the University of Bristol’s National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement² on how to engage with policymakers , our team knew the best approach we could take (and we would suggest this approach for other iGEM teams with parallel goals) was to find our allies and create a following large enough to garner the attention of the key players in policymaking we may not have been able to contact directly. Our team decided to set a realistic goal in making a change in our home-town the city of London Ontario. Using guidance from the National Center for Health Research³, after we composed our letter, we e-mailed it to every City of London ward councillor, environmental group, and municipal election candidates with a simple form attached asking these potential supporters to electronically sign their name if any of the subjects and suggestions within the letter align with what they believe in. This tactic of gaining political supportive signatures was the most time-efficient and low-maintenance approach our team brainstormed. To view the e-mail script we created click here.

Accomplishments of the Letter

Our letter campaign succeeded in gaining the attention of the City of London municipality and influencing policy reform regarding emerging contaminants in wastewater.

Within 3 days of our team sending out our letter, we received positive responses from the following City Representatives:

Ward 12 Coucillor Elizabeth Peloza
Ward 6 councillor Phil Squire
Ward 2 Councillor Shawn Lewis
Ward 3 Councilor Mo Salih
Mayor of London Assistant
EnviroWestern

A few councillors and EnviroWestern (the environment advocacy club on campus) were familiar with the lack of regulations in place and responded that they fully support our initiative and thought “it was about time”(Peloza) actionable change began regarding the issue. For other representatives our letter was the first information they had heard of the issue and wanted to support us because “if it is our job to know and we don’t, I can’t imagine most other people are looking out for themselves on this issue either”(Lewis). These responses provided confirmation that what our team was trying to accomplish did not only matter to us, put also to the people whose job it is to keep the public safe.

Our team had meetings with both Councillor Elizabeth Peloza and Phil Squire.

Phil Squire wanted to know how he could help us achieve our goals and offered to introduce us Scott Mathers, Director of Water for the City of London. This introduction is one we would not have achieved if we had not taken the approach to first build allies who then can provide connections to higher authoritative figures.

Elizabeth Peloza invited our team to City Hall to discuss the contents of our letter and provide us with direction on which steps to take further. Peloza connected our team with her contact at Big Blue, the David Suzuki foundation that believes access to clean water should be a protected human right. Peloza also connected our team to pediatric doctors Dr. Anna Gunz and Dr.McKelvie who have research interests in child environmental health and how environmental issues (such as rising levels of pharmaceuticals in fresh water sources) have an impact on the emerging trends being seen in child health. These connections have led to discussions with interdisciplinary industries on the problem of emerging contaminants in wastewater and have fostered new awareness for our project with experts about how synthetic biology can aid in solving the problem.

During our meeting at City Hall our team was also introduced to the Mayor of London, Ed Holder and got to explain our iGEM project to him. We also had the opportunity to attend the Huron County Joint Board Meeting on Wastewater.

Although these meetings raised awareness and support within the municipality surrounding the need for wastewater contaminant regulations, it also encouraged new dialogue within the municipality about how a team of students have created a synthetic biology solution to solve the problem (we were always quick to bring up our solution!).

Our letter campaign gained enough circulation throughout City Hall that when the time came to speak with Scott Mathers, director of water and acting engineer for the City of London he had already been forwarded our letter multiple times and we had been given 3 introductions to him. Scott believed that we had earned a seat at the table to discuss implementing some of the recommendations of our letter.

The largest accomplishment of our letter campaign is the agreement with Scott that it is necessary for the City of London to create in town regulations and begin testing the Thames River (the river the wastewater effluent flows into) for pharmaceutical levels. Scott emphasized most regulations are put in place retrospectively after harm has been proven. The threat of pharmaceuticals building up within municipal water sources and having the potential to be recirculated and cause harm to aquatic and human life is slowly increasing5. With our team’s guidance, the City of London now wants to test and monitor these levels before it is too late and harm is done. This new advance in wastewater regulation provides peace of mind and safety to the citizens of London.

Our team has also been working with Scoot Mathers to provide the City of London information to create 3 new online web resources for the City of London regarding ways in which individual water pollution can be decreased. Due to the recommendations of our letter, with our information the city is also creating a green bill slip (a bookmark sized paper) informing city citizens of the sources of emerging contaminants in wastewater, listing ways households can prevent water contamination and an introduction to our iGEM project to be mailed inside every hyrdo bill within the City of London in first quarter 2020. This equates to be over 150 000 informative slips on wastewater and synthetic biology solutions to the general public.

The support our project received within the City of London has cultivated discussion for synthetic biology to be used as a strategy to provide economic solution for environmental problems. Our letter to the city has created the potential for government support for future synthetic biology projects. We are proud to have created two-way dialogue between researchers and government officials. We hope future iGEM teams can learn from and leverage our experience to pursue the possibility of government collaboration to achieve public engagement and education goals of new synthetic biology solutions.

Stakeholder Podcasts

Our HP team thought that because wastewater is not the most interesting of topics, a lively podcast may be an interesting way to engage listeners on our project and synthetic biology. Our team set the goal of 10 episodes by wiki freeze and did not accomplish this goal. Although our team read many resources on how to create a podcast we overlooked how to engage and acquire podcast guest. Our team had an entire podcast planning documentand podcast scripts before we had adequate guests to interview for our podcast. Our team spent time making podscript for the type of individuals we wanted to discuss in our podcast before we had guest secured to speak on our podcast and this resulted in lost time and resources. We feel the need a team to learn from our mistakes and help future iGEM team spend time on acquiring guests before making podcast scripts. We urge teams interested in creating a podcast for your project to find guests first, and then tailor the script to the expert. Because of this we created a guide to acquiring podcast guest we wish we had before endeavouring into the podcast realm.

To hear the podcast interviews and episode we recorded please click the following links:

Wastewater 101: Speaking with Gary Burrow, Wastewater Supervisor about the basics of wastewater management and how the system works.

Synthetic Biology For All:Speaking with Kathleen Hill and Bogumil Karas about the past, present and future of synthetic biology.

Health Product Stewardship Association

Through our research and conversations with key stakeholders, we learned that one of the major classes of emerging contaminants that were ending up in waste water were personal pharmaceutical products. Much of this effluence comes from individuals and households who improperly dispose of waste. We decided to target this issue at the source and see how individuals could be encouraged to reduce their contribution to water contamination. In talking to pharmacies, we learned that many pharmacies in Canada partner with the Health Product’s Stewardship Association (HPSA) which runs a drug bring back program. We reached out to HPSA to see if we could help increase awareness about the importance of diverting drugs from water bodies and they told us if we can provide knowledge on student understanding it would be valuable to the organization. We created an educational tool to gather information on knowledge of the drug bring back program and in doing so, hopefully increase participation in the program. The questions in this tool are included below.

Q1: What do you currently do with your prescription drugs or over-the-counter drugs after expiration?
Q2: Have you ever heard of Ontario's drug bring back program?
Q3 Please check below acknowledging you have read the guidelines to safely dispose off medication (we provided HPSA graphic guidelines)
Q4: How likely are you to return leftover medications back to the pharmacy?
Q5: iGEM Western is part of Western Synthetic Biology Research Club. We are always looking for new members to join our growing team. If you are interested in finding out more information please enter your Western email below.

Our partnership with the HPSA and subsequent educational tools helped us gain a better understanding of the public’s awareness about proper drug disposal methods which will in turn help the continuation of our project. We were able to engage students and get them thinking about their individual impact on water contamination and how synthetic biology could be used to create a solution. Our educational tool was evaluated by 150 western students. It was posted in first year lectures, on campus and endorsed by environmental clubs on campus such as EnviroWestern. We had some respondents email us asking to learn more about the issue and our iGEM project.

References

Suave, S. & Desrosiers, M> et al. .A review of what is an emerging contaminant. Chem.Cent. J 8 15 (2014).
Policy Makers. Policy makers | NCCPE (2019). How to engage with policy makers Available at: https://www.publicengagement.ac.uk/do-engagement/understanding-audiences/policy-makers. (Accessed: 21st October 2019)

National Center for Health Research Writing to Policy Makers(2017) Available at: http://www.center4research.org/writing-policy-makers/. (Accessed: 21st October 2019)

Team:Western Canada/Public Engagement