Human Practices Public Engagement

Fundraising

One aspect, perhaps not completely a type of public outreach that necessarily supports our idea of sustainability, included learning how to obtain public fundraising. Our main achievement included making a gofundme page and raising over £500 on it! Check it out: https://www.gofundme.com/f/plastic-energy/

Media Communication

When we began in February, we immediately started thinking of ways to use social media to not only spread awareness about our project and the targeted issue, we also wanted to be able to communicate with other teams and organizations. By creating our Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/igem.uow/?hl=en/) , that was our first step in showing our presence. We made it a mission to actively show the progress we had gained in our lab and human practices, in addition to reacting and mentioning other iGEM teams from around the world. Therefore, it was no surprise when those teams started contacting us in order to propose collaborations.

Additionally, we also created a Twitter account (https://twitter.com/westminsterigem?lang=en/), wherein we perused iGEM accounts to find events, such as the New Castle iGEM Meet-up, and challenges that we can do to promote our cause. Also, we were able to find more investors for our project with the help of these tools.

By the end of our project, we were asked to talk about our project to the university’s main media channel, Smoke media. We told them a bit about our project and are expecting to see the title up by the end of the month!

Plastic Cleanups

Plastic Clean up Mission

We have organised a plastic clean up event with Plastic Patrol (https://plasticpatrol.co.uk/ ) in a highly polluted and waste-contaminated river in Stratford, London, River Lee Navigation.

To clean up the plastic waste in the water, we were given paddleboards and grappling tools to grab the plastic, along with any other type of non-compostable waste and place it on a basket. Plastic patrol also offered us access to their phone app that allows to count the plastic waste collected from a mission which they use to obtain statistics on types of plastics most disposed that could be useful in pursuing manufacturers to whether change the type of material they are using or switch to other types of more sustainable products. Most of the waste we found were indeed made from plastic, and the most concerning component to it was that many of the pieces were small enough to be ingested by fish. Other most common waste included aluminium and cardboard.

School Visits

During the project, one of our goals was to spread awareness about plastic pollution to the younger generation, while targeting the older generation using social media. To do this, we decided to contact as many as 340 schools over the span of 6 months, in order to do workshops, where the students would be briefed on the current situation regarding plastics and the methods that they can use to help combat this problem! By using, child-friendly presentations and entertaining videos, we wished to educate them and help them understand what steps they can take to become ‘mini-heroes’ of the Earth!

One of our main plans for the school visits was to have the children join a contest, where they reuse single-use plastic waste and turn it into a tool or decoration they can use at home, and when they are done, they can send as an image and we would post it on our Instagram account. The winner would be rewarded with a prize! However, with the consent of the parents, all pictures of the works of art sent to us would be posted with the “artist’s” name!

Examples of what could be done:

We love to promote good human practices, and for school visits idea we want to promote the work we were offered as help from the passionate Calgary iGEM team. They provided us with a wonderful presentation, that could be used when visiting high schools, and that may help inspire the students to study science in the future. It even had a protocol on an exercise that can be done, where the students can extract DNA from Strawberries, to further their understanding of what the DNA looks like, and how fragile and unique it is!

Science4u Fair

Science4uFair

During the Science4uFair the team delivered a presentation surrounding the topic of plastic pollution and the resolution we hoped to salvage the problem with; genetic engineering of bacteria to produce microbial fuel cells. The complex idea was however, of course, simplified to suit our audience (secondary school pupils between the ages of 11-16) and broken down by intermittent answer/question breaks to engage the pupils attention and check to see that they were following.

We attempted to make the session interactive by employing optical microscopes for the students to gain kinetic approach to the learning and ascertain our information by allowing them to view the bacteria in real-life. The bacteria provided was gram-stained to evidence our speech about the differences in bacterial cell wall structure and why geneticists are always predominantly focused on using E.coli in research (with the thinner peptidoglycan wall being more penetrable and viable for use in plasmid transformation).

Our stall at the science4u fair proved a success with many students appearing to be seemingly captivated; voluntarily choosing to ask questions and answer those given throughout our talk.

Synthetic Biology Seminar

The team attended the SynBio seminar held at UCL where synthetic biology post docs shared their latest work and findings related. An informal affair, the dedicated geneticists not only divulged the gruelling hardships they experienced throughout their laboratory work but also highlighted the promising results they had obtained. On the whole the seminar was very well received by the whole team and even led to a collaboration with the UCL iGEM team - with our very own Team lead by Lucas Dalla Vecchia dedicating much time and effort in creating code for the UCL cohort, paving a new way for the future of sustainable laboratory practice in iGEM.

UN Sustainable Development Goals

We addressed the global campaign started this year by the united nations committee designed for pursuing the society into getting involved and promoting the ways that we are following and promoting the idea of sustainability all over the world - with hopes of inspiring all nations to ultimately take action at the level of all working classes of society.

We addressed this scheme in two ways; one being directly through iGEM, in a collaboration started by teams Costa Rica, Tuebingen, and TAS Taipei.

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Team:Westminster UK/Public Engagement

Public Debut