Team:IISc-Bangalore/Sustainable
The United Nations has enunicated 17 goals as the heart of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Team iGEM IISc-Bangalore is committed to the realisation of these goals in our own activities. This page summarises the UN SDGs which our project conforms with and how our project complies with the target(s) under those goals.
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015, provides a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future. At its heart are the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are an urgent call for action by all countries - developed and developing - in a global partnership. They recognize that ending poverty and other deprivations must go hand-in-hand with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth - all while tackling climate change and working to preserve our oceans and forests. Our project is in line with the following Sustainable Development Goals laid out by the UN:
Goal 3: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages
Target 3.9:
By 2030, substantially reduce the number of deaths and illnesses from hazardous chemicals and air, water and soil pollution and contamination
The main objective Project CellOPHane aims to achieve is to build a cheap, scalable, easy to use and effective filter to combat organophosphate pollution. Organophosphates are a class of hazardous compounds found in pesticides. In the agricultural community in India, organophosphate toxicity is the leading cause of chemical related deaths. Reports by various NGOs have shown overwhelmingly alarming levels of organophosphate residues in bottled drinking water and in the blood of farmers from the heavy pesticide consuming regions of India. This has tremendously contributed to the increase in risks of cancer in the fertile breadbaskets of the country like Punjab.
Our project is aligned with Target 3.9.1 and 3.9.2 as we seek to build an effective solution to remove organophosphates from water, thereby preventing all the health hazards associated with organophosphate toxicity.
Furthermore, suicide by organophosphate consumption is also widespread in many parts of the globe. We believe that this filter can be applied in a medical setting to filter out chemicals from the blood, in conjunction with the technique of haemodialysis. It will require changes in the filter design to make it suitable for said medical applications, but the basic filter design remains the same.
Besides the above-mentioned points, the filter that we seek to implement is a 'plug-n-play' platform, which makes it easy to design analogous bioremediation strategies with minimal modifications. This would go a long way to fulfill the Target 3.9 of the SDGs.
Goal 4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
Target 4.1:
By 2030, ensure that all girls and boys complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education leading to relevant and effective learning outcomes
While we have started reaching out to schools and child education organizations, our long-term plan is to help all kinds of primary and secondary school students enhance their knowledge in basic synthetic biology and appreciate its impact in the modern world. It was with this idea, that we initiated our efforts on writing a comprehensive and illustrative book, which is written by students, for students. We are dutybound to ensure that the book is available in print to the maximum number of beneficiaries at a minimum price. Aside from this, we have made interacted with primary students all around the country through initiatives like Talk-to-a-scientist. We have also focused on creating audiobooks, a hitherto seldom used medium of communication, to ensure that we not only reach out to people through more effective media and convey our ideas in as short a span of time as possible, but also ensure equity and inclusivity by addressing the needs of the visually challenged. For more details about this, visit our Communication page
Goal 6: Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
Target 6.3
By 2030, improve water quality by reducing pollution, eliminating dumping and minimizing release of hazardous chemicals and materials, halving the proportion of untreated wastewater and substantially increasing recycling and safe reuse globally
Target 6.a
By 2030, expand international cooperation and capacity-building support to developing countries in water- and sanitation-related activities and programmes, including water harvesting, desalination, water efficiency, wastewater treatment, recycling and reuse technologies.
Organophosphate pollution in water bodies is a major problem - it is extremely hazardous to both the health of living organisms, and the environment. Project CellOPHane aims to build a filter to combat organophosphate pollution. One of the industrial applications of this filter would be sewage treatment plants, where they would be efficient solutions to remove contaminants that other treatments can not remove. Further, the plug and play model we are developing can be implemented to combat other toxic compounds in water and sewage. These efforts would go a long way to improve the quality of water available to all and reduce mortality and occurrence of diseases in individuals consuming drinking water contaminated with these potent neurotoxins.
Our we are in the position to implement the model in an industrial setting, we would look for ways to improve it and make it cheaper, more efficient, and have higher reusability, while parallelly reaching out to various stakeholders who could help the device reach more and more locations. We want to use iGEM as an international forum to share our model with the world, so that they may use it for what they need the most. Read more about our interaction with various stakeholders here.
Goal 14: Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development
Target 14.1
By 2025, prevent and significantly reduce marine pollution of all kinds, in particular from land-based activities, including marine debris and nutrient pollution
The main source of Organophosphate population in agricultural runoff and subsequent eutrophication. Implementing the filter in an agricultural setting where it can filter the agricultural runoff directly, or in an industrial setting where the filtering occurs before the filtered water is dumped into water bodies would significantly help in reducing organophosphate pollution. The modular water-filter that Project CellOPHane aspires to build shall not only address the immediate issue of organophosphate contamination of water bodies, but also go a long way to combat other kinds of contamination of water (heavy metal contamination, organochlorine contamination, etc.)
References
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https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/news/communications-material/
Accessed on 18 October 2021 -
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/
Accessed on 17 October 2021.