Spreading awareness to our community
In project PHoeBe, our goal is to achieve a more effective biodegradation of PHB plastics, a type of biodegradable plastic that is much more sustainable and environmentally friendly compared to the non-biodegradable plastics that lots of people use on Earth. Through degrading PHB, we can make PHB recycling easier by using the monomer products of PHB degradation and building them back into the plastic itself. This way, it is possible to recycle PHB for many and many more times compared to the current traditional way of recycling plastic, where the plastic keeps getting weaker after every recycling time and at some point, we can no longer recycle it.
As part of our Science Communications and Human Practices, our mission is not only to spread the words about project PHoeBe, but to also emphasize to the community around us about the concepts involved in our project. Some examples of the concepts that our Outreach team focuses on highlighting are the difference between biodegradable plastics and non-biodegradable plastics, the three R’s of waste management (reduce, reuse, recycle), and many more. This way, we can effectively promote our mission and values to transform our own community!
We had the opportunity to talk with Professors Dimitri Deheyn and Christian Diercks to learn more about microplastic pollution and to get feedback on our project. Professor Deheyn explained how widespread microplastics are, the different chemicals they carry, and the potential long-term effects on health. He also emphasized that solving this problem requires more than science, pointing out the role of consumer choices, economic challenges, and the need for action from the public, industry, and policymakers.
Professor Diercks shared his perspective on biological solutions, describing a bioreactor that uses genetically engineered Alteromonas bacteria to safely break down PHB in seawater. He gave practical advice on building a prototype and stressed that scientific ideas need to be balanced with real-world feasibility. Talking with both experts gave us valuable insights, helped improve our project, and showed us how important it is to combine scientific research with practical and social considerations to address environmental challenges.
With a passion for ensuring that our local beaches have a clean environment, we have hosted a beach cleanup at Del Mar beach, a beach that lots of people in our community visit. During the beach cleanup, three volunteers from our Outreach team have spent two hours looking for and picking up trash at the beach. Along the way, we had many wholesome interactions with the people around us who thanked and complimented us for our work, one person also helped us get a piece of trash too!
Our group of volunteers not only went around on the beach and the grassland nearby, we also went into the surrounding neighborhood to find trash as well. At the end, we were able to collect two trash bags containing lots of bigger trash (such as a pizza box, a water bottle, and a snack bag) as well as smaller trash (like straw wrappers, cigarette butts, and even tiny pieces of littered paper or plastics). To us, it didn’t matter whether the piece of trash was big or small, because our ultimate goal was to keep our local beaches clean and free of all trash!
We hosted lessons at Adobe Bluffs Elementary School to teach students about waste pollution and the three R’s of waste management. Through these lessons, we got the chance to have a collaboration with Westview 3D Printing Club, a club at our school that focuses on 3D printing education for students in the community and our high school. After many trials and errors, Westview 3D Printing Club has used their knowledge to 3D print 9 keychains for us, three of which we have gifted to our club advisor (our PI) and our Wet Lab mentors, we also gifted another 3 keychains to the three classes of the students we taught at Adobe Bluffs Elementary. Not only do these keychains represent our team’s spirit, they were also a way for us to save the amazing memory of our lessons in the classrooms of the Adobe Bluffs Elementary students!
Additionally, our collaboration with Westview 3D Printing Club has allowed us to expand our reach as we connected more closely with their club by aiding them with spreading the words about their mission and their 3D printing workshops to the students they would love to teach one day at Adobe Bluffs Elementary. Moreover, we also published an Instagram post together to sum up Westview iGEM’s elementary school lessons and our collaboration with each other. The post gained lots of interactions from members of both our team and their club, and this gave both of us the chance to reach out to more people!
With the help of our Wet Lab mentors, we hosted an ethics symposium at JCVI where the iGEM teams from Del Norte High and Canyon Crest Academy came to talk about their research. Various expert researchers at JCVI also joined and listened to every iGEM team’s presentation. During the ethics symposium, we introduced and educated about the specifics of our research and our mission in general. Through the ethics symposium, we received lots of helpful feedback and curious questions from other iGEM teams and JCVI’s expert researchers. These feedback and questions have aided us in refining our project and considering the ethical aspects of our research. Moreover, we also learned a lot from listening to the presentations from other iGEM teams. For example, their projects inspired many of our Outreach activities like our expert interviews. We were also able to gain a lot more responses for our Community Outreach Survey thanks to advice from Canyon Crest Academy iGEM.
Throughout our Outreach activities, we designed visually appealing fliers to spread the words about the ways that the public can get involved in our mission. There were two fliers that we designed this year: one about our Community Outreach Survey, and another one to invite others to join our beach cleanup at Del Mar beach. These fliers really helped us gain more support and participation from individuals.
We published both of these fliers on our Instagram, our main social media page, to receive online interactions. We also hung up our Outreach Survey flier at different places like through our high school and its classrooms, a local Starbucks shop, and many local libraries. Additionally, many of our Outreach members also showed these fliers to people they know. Overall, hanging up and spreading these fliers not only helped us receive more responses for our survey but it also gave us the chance to introduce our project and our mission to many people that we talked to.