Description
Background & Investigation
Paper plays an utmost important role in human daily life. No one could ever imagine what would happen without the presence of paper. In 2018, around 422 million metric tons of paper consumed globally. In the future, the amount of paper consumes expect to grow steadily over the next decade, reaching approximately 461 million metric tons in 2030. Papers are made from tons of trees, which means that mammoth amount of trees will be cutting off. Loss of trees will cause many environmental issues such as climate change, flooding, increased greenhouse gases and a host of problems for indigenous people.
We use the same procedure when pre-experiment making recycle paper with Cai Lun as picture shown above. Also, we found essays online that sericin and chitosan can enhance quality of paper by adding them into paper pulp. What’s more, there are also study shows that enzyme deinking is an environmentally friendly process. So, we focus on putting genes of these materials into Escherichia coli in series.
Design
First, as what we already mentioned in abstract, although our technology has improved a lot, the quality of recycled paper is still not as perfect as first-hand paper. So, we design an experiment in order to test if we can improve the quality of recycled paper. The materials we chose to use are additives sericin and chitosan, because according to the online research we had done, sericin can make recycled paper softer and more resilient while chitosan can make recycled paper harder and more folding endurant.
There are four groups in our experiment. One group is control group. The other three groups are experimental groups. The control group is original recycled paper made by us. The first experimental group is recycled paper with only sericin. The second one is recycled paper with only chitosan. The third one is paper with both sericin and chitosan. Here are the boxes of paper pulp with sericin and chitosan in it. We use turbulator and paper already used to make paper pulp. Lastly, We will test the strength, capacity, folding endurance and other measurements to see if the quality of recycled paper can be improved by sericin and chitosan.
Why we are doing this
While doing a geography project around school, students in IGEM teams had discovered that there were many papers that only used one-side had been throw away into the recycle box that provide in the hall. However, it is a really long process to recycle paper and it is also a burden for school to purchase paper from time to time. In a larger perspective, recycle paper can also provide environmental issues from happening. After doing pre-experiment, we found out that recycled paper do not contain smooth surface and more environmental friendly deinking process. Base on these two problems, we are considering that whether we can enhance quality and deinking process of recycle paper.
