Team:OUC-China/Sustainable
Meet SDGs
Sustainable development goals(SDG) are the 17 global development goals formulated at the United Nations Summit, September 25, 2015. At the summit, 193 member states of the United Nations officially adopted 17 sustainable development goals. The sustainable development goal aims to completely solve the development problems in the three dimensions of society, economy and environment in a comprehensive way. It is expected to guide the global development work from 2015 to 2030.
Our project promotes four SDGs’development.
A.SDG6：Clean water and sanitation
SDG6 aims to ensure the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all is the wisdom of SDG6. Antibiotic is a new emerging contaminants since the discovery of penicillin. One one hand, people mastered an effective way defeating bacteria infection. One the other hand, the ever ever increasing use of antibiotic may pollute nature water, influence ecosystem and human health in a negative way. Our project is to develop a whole cell biosensor detecting antibiotic. At present, the commonly used chemistry based antibiotic detecting method such as LC-MS is complex, machine and technicians dependent, which limited the regular monitoring environmental antibiotic concentration. Our design is faster, cheaper and more user-friendly, thus can be applied more generally, which may greatly promote the monitor system, and call on public awareness of antibiotic contamination.
B.SDG11：Sustainable Cities and Communities
SDG11 aims to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. Globally considering, the urban population has already surpassed the rural population. Thus, developing sustainable cities can benefit the welfare of the majority of human beings. Our product, namely whole cell biosensor for antibiotic detection, can be applied in several different scenarios, contributing on the sustainability.For example, the government can use our product to achieve effective monitoring of nature water, domestic waste, discharge water of farms and pharmaceutical factories. On contrary, the units to be monitored can also apply our product to self-check whether they break the law. All parties create a safer environment together!
C.SDG17:Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development.
This year, we initiate a alliance named New Pollutants Alliance, which contains five 2021 iGEM teams including us. Here are a brief introduction of our alliance members. We can easily see that all of our five teams are dedicated in solving new pollutants related problems though synthetic biology.
Besides，we organized New Pollutants Workshop online, gathering the scholars from different fields(including ecotoxicology, synthetic biology and legislation)and stakeholders (rapid testing company inclusively) to have a in depth sharing and discussion. Because we believe that environmental issues are all all comprehensive social problems and need the collaboration of multiple parties. Our alliance might be contemporary, but the form can be long lasting, because the workshop achieved big success(See more detail on our Initiator of New Pollutants Alliance page)!
D.SDG4：Quality Education
SDG4 aims to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. This year, we actively reached children and young teenagers in different regions. Even though we were suggested to abandon lecturing synthetic biology for it seems to be too difficult for children to understand, we successfully made our lecture understandable for children. We hold both online and offline lectures as well as online and offline lab tour. We felt grateful for using internet to reach children thousands miles away(See more detail on our For children in underdeveloped region), and reach local teenagers for epidemics’ sake.
Our project’ ultimate goal is to solve the antibiotic related problem. The effort of scientists and engineers are not enough for sure. Irrational uptake of antibiotic based drugs is one of the main reasons of antibiotic contamination. Thus, we wrote science popularizing articles to rise the awareness of public concern and prove some instructions for use antibiotic rationally.(See more detail in our education page)
Entrepreneurship
If our project stops in design and was created just for joining iGEM, it’s promotion on sustainability is too limited. Thus, we actively made field research, seriously considered our target users, and wrote a business plan. Thanks to Nanjing_NFLS, we reached the vice president of Nanjing Wandes Environmental Protection Technology Co., Ltd, named Yuan Daoying, who is also a senior engineer, to read our business plan and provided us professional and previous suggestions.
The graph below it the feedback of Mr. Yuan from Nanjing Wandes Environmental Protection Technology Co., Ltd. We are encouraged and feel grateful for his sincere advice.
Study and Refinement of Law
In order to achieve sustainability, legislation can never be neglected.
Let’s see the the definition of new pollutants first: Emerging pollutants are chemicals and compounds that have recently been identified as dangerous to the environment, and consequently to the health of human beings. In addition, many of these emerging pollutants have not been regulated under national or international legislation, hence posing a greater risk to our livelihood.——United Nations Environmental Program
Thus, since new pollutants is a vacancy on the concept of law, it needs more discussion.
This year, we happily collaborate with Shiyu Cai, Lezhi Guan and Tang Linrong, who are the undergraduates in LLB of Law School, OUC & James E. Rogers College of Law, UA. Here is their wonderful report.
