Q: How did your Human Practices work to inform and shape your project at different stages?
With the improvement of technologies and the economy, industrialization caused uncountable environmental issues that are detrimental to people's health physically, as well as nature. Moreover, large quantities of trees are being cut, and a large proportion of contaminations are produced by paper production, which even pollutes the longest river in China. Hence, as the human practice group, we decided to focus on recycled paper.
As is known to all, when deinking the waste paper, the industry will try to pour a tremendous volume of water and waste a huge amount of electricity, which will decrease dependable resources. Therefore, we aspired to decrease those consumptions and determined to create a more efficient way for deinking paper by gene engineering.
To start our program, we wanted to experiment with how to improve the quality and efficiency of deinking. However, when we first prepared our test to check whether the Soybean Milk machine can be helpful to deink the ink successfully or not, we discovered the way is similar when producing the recycled paper that has been concentrated too much due to being positive to the environment. By asking our classmates and teachers, we realized the utilization of recycled paper is severely limited on the ground that the recycled paper lacks high quality. Therefore, with the characteristic of being easy to break down, which is brittle and can be folded conveniently, recycled paper is not widespread. How about improving its quality by using gene engineering to contribute more to the environment and advocate recycled paper's significance?
Then, as the second part of our program, we investigated the exact records of adjusting the proportion of sericin and chitosan, making the paper more flexible and soft and allowing people to use it as a notebook or other materials in the office or school. At this time, our target was confirmed: adjusting the proportion of sericin and chitosan to enhance the quality of recycled paper for being widely used.
Constantly communicated with other schools, we participated in a meetup that organized many schools to share our program and ideas. Also, the professor in the meetup gave us several suggestions about our topic and the whole experimental designing process. After we demonstrated our program, one of the professors told us that we need to focus more on the current situations of paper production and the applications in the market. Also, we need to consider the recycling problems after we adjust the proportion. Based on those precious suggestions, our Human Practice group decided to interview the manager of the paper industry, as well as making the questionnaire which closely and precisely attached to the opinions.
At the same time, we embarked on interviewing journey by making a questionnaire and sharing it on multiple social media. Consequently, we collected over 500 people's results and then came out with our analysis for those questions and answers. When designing which questions should be asked, we interviewed our participants about their familiarity and impression of the utilization of recycled paper. More essentially, we also concentrated on their acceptance of the "advanced recycled paper" to collect their attitude and change our slogans to be more attractive and acceptable. Furthermore, we found that when asking them about those environmental issues, people tended to emphasize the wasting of available resources. According to the interview, a large number of polluted water produced by paper-making is discharged at will, which affects the drinking water and life safety of residents. Thus, in order to reduce pollution discharge, we should put our concentration on the improvement of environmental protection without any pollution in the recycled paper-making process.
Nest turn, accompanied by the data we collected, our human practice group organized an online meetup. We shared our ideas and the process of our experiment. Through this process, we encountered a group with a similar topic, which is UESTC-China. They told us that they were interested in paper's self-production and highlighted the importance of recycled paper that brings lots of benefits to the environment without contamination. Their point of view was tightly connected with our topic, and their opinions were as same as ours. As a result, we decided to be the partner for each other for further communication and cooperation.
It was the first time to get familiar with each other that we held an online communication and interview to being acquainted with our project detailly and precisely. Then, we interviewed them with several questions about their human practice progressing and the issue of the deinking paper. Painstakingly deinking the paper, both of us cannot deink it successfully. Hence, the leader of UESTC-China told us why not using evaporate water as the solution to deink, which gave us many inspirations. Also, they expressed their confusion in how to design the outcomes of their experiment to show the results clearly. Our members suggested distributing the form by using time and strength or more units. They can also use some types of equipment for testing and adjusting, as the equipment to measure the force and resistance of paper. Moreover, we held an online charity course for distributing the notion of protecting the environment and how momentous recycled paper is. By our distinguished assignment of works and our contributions, we received many positive comments and encouragement from those students in Sichuan Liangshan, by which we recognized the meaning of our program is not only to protect the environment by ourselves but also spread this viewpoint to many people to raise their awareness of protecting nature.
Being endeavor to create an iGEM Constructors club in our school, we prepared the poster and speech to introduce our club and attract more students to attend specifically. After propagating positively, we got 21 new members in our club, involving the students interested in biology and gene engineering. We also held several club activities to let those students know more about iGEM and the related concepts about genes (DNA replication, translation, transcription). By which they can pre-learned the knowledge taught by the teacher in future.
When it comes to the ending part of our experiment, the experimental groups told us about their difficulties in testing. Thus, we interviewed Professor Li about how to build the data model and construct our equipment to test the quality of the paper. For one thing, he provided us with some scripts about a brief force-resistance measure machine. By which we can estimate the resistance of the power to judge flexibility. For another, he taught our model designer to construct the form and build relationships with each data for specific measurement.
Last but not least, as we finished the whole process in the experiment, we contacted Beijing Haidian Experimental Primary School to educate and spread the idea of recycled paper for 4th-grade students. We understandably introduced our experiment and created several competitions and games to provide a pleasant atmosphere. Also, the history of paper-making was introduced as extra knowledge to broaden their horizons. After the meaningful lesson, those students joyfully told us that it was an unforgettable time since they learned a lot about paper-making, recycled paper, and gene engineering.
Q: How did your team choose to respond to your Silver medal work? How did your Silver medal Human Practices and Proposed Implementation inform your ethical, technical, safety and/or communication decisions?
As the four silver criteria stated, our project needs to meet engineering success, collaboration, human practices, and proposed implementation.
For the engineering success part, the main section that would be able to demonstrate our effort would be our improvement on the paper-making molds and mechanics. Initially, we chose to use conventional paper-making methods to produce the paper that we would send to the lab for detailed data as samples. We would first produce the paper pulp from the recycled paper by home-use blenders and pots, and then sericin and chitosan would be added into the pulp by a certain ratio that was discovered by our research and experiment. However, we found this method too ineffective for producing high quality samplings, so we improved the method of producing paper by using professional equipment such as oscillators and beakers to make sure that the sampling we make would fully demonstrate the result that we would like to receive. Also, we adjusted the molds that we use for paper production into the regular A4 size to ensure that most of the variables would not affect the data of our samples.
As for the collaboration, we contacted with the iGEM team UESTC-China that shares a similar topic and research direction as we do. The two teams met during one of the offline meet-ups on which both of the teams briefly introduced their studies and we both found the topics that we share very related and the result of one’s study would benefit the experimental process of the other. Therefore, we immediately built connections right after the meet-up ended and the team leaders exchanged ideas for a better collaboration. After communication, we organized an online meeting with the team members of experimental and human practice teams from the two teams and exchanged ideas on the process of paper recycling and deinking of the written paper. After discussing about the possible ways to cooperate, we attended a charity program together to spread our results and discoveries.
When we were discussing about the topic of our study, many of the students mentioned about the waste of paper on our campus. We could always find clean draft paper lying in the trash bin unused, and many test papers were only printed on one side of the paper. With this problem in mind, we recalled some studies and experiments that we had read about paper recycling and environmental protection. After deciding on the research topic, we interviewed the owner of a paper mill to ensure that our assumption and all the information about recycled paper that we gathered are reliable and true. With further studies and the results of our experiments, we organized a charity program to teach the kids of Liangshan about fundamental knowledge about paper recycling together with UESTC-China. By giving this lecture and teaching them about basic paper-recycling methods, we believe that our study was proven beneficial both environmentally and economically for some kids in tight living condition to be normally educated with paper books.
We hope that the result that we get from the study could benefit paper mills and even the whole paper industry for the greater good of the environment and all human beings. With chitosan and sericin added into the paper pulp, we hope that the recycled paper could be cheaper to produce with a higher quality. The two chemical that we add into the paper pulp are both extracted from nature so that there would not be ethical issues or potential harm to human body or the environment. We have organized a lot of activities and lecture to spread our project to the public so that people could see the benefits of using recycled paper so that they could truly recycle the paper that they have used. However, when we were researching through the entire process, we found it difficult for a paper mill to adjust their production lines because the machines were fixed in their place because of the need of automation of paper production, so there would be little chance for them to add an extra process of adding extra chemicals in the middle of the production. Still, we are trying to solve this problem and design a more reasonable and realistic method to apply to all the factories and paper mills.
Q: How did you decide which needs or values to prioritize in your project’s design? What compromises, if any, did you choose to make and why?
Since Covid-19 had influences globally, our team had considered safety to be precedence as we promote our human practice from time to time. We have no access to laboratory as often as we usually do and we cannot interview people directly on street. To compromised problems above, our teams had made some expedient practices. Firstly, our team had organizing IGEM Meet Up online in order to maintain social distancing and avoid pandemic further spread through the city. We had communicated with lots of high schools’ students and university students about our ideas together through online meetings to keep everyone safe. When we disseminate our idea to some primary schools, we had first contact headmaster of the school to get consent. We had also passed the nucleoid acid test before entering to that school.
What’s more, our team had also interview people through online meetings which is very difficult to make appointments. Since opportunities of interviewing is restricted, we are precious with these opportunities and recorded all the interviews in order to make precise outcome from it.
Similar with interview opportunities, we also have limited opportunities to access to lab. We had only done lab inside of our school and record all the procedure in lab. Our team had also design comprehensive experiment method before ingress laboratory in order to get precise and accurate result in the least amount of time.
Q: How did your team “close the loop” between what was designed and what was desired?
After we settled on the topic of paper recycling, the team started to design the experiment of finding the ideal ratio of sericin and chitosan. In order to fully convert our ideas into actions, we researched a lot for paper production and we interviewed with the owner of a paper mill to learn about the production process. Based on what we learned about the method of paper industry, we made slight but necessary adjustment to the production line so that we could make sure the method is correct, scientific, and specific for our project. With clear targets in mind, we combined the gathered resources with our own creations based on it.
Also, the cooperation of us with many other teams benefitted each other when we were sharing ideas during offline meet-ups and online meetings. There experimental results helped us a lot when we try to “close the loop” of setting targets and designing methods to accomplish what we are after. The experimental team and the human practice group helped each other as well through communications and organizing activities.
We hope to make the public aware that recycled paper is truly beneficial for the society and the environment. We desire that the society could hear our voice and notice all the environmental damage that the paper industry nowadays is causing, so we have our project designed to meet this common will of all teammates and, hopefully, all individuals of this society and those who should be responsible
End of Integrated Human Practices part
We interviewed the manager of paper production industry
31 Aug,2021
• In order to know more about the current situation of paper production, which will enable us to be more familiar with the necessity of our project and continue to progress to be more influential, we decided to interview the manager of the paper production industry.
• In the beginning, we prepared several questions in the professional fields of paper production to ask the manager. Also, we discussed the application of recycled paper in the current market to realize the importance of our project. Those questions and answers are followed below:
Dialog
Q: Can you tell us the basic sources of paper-making materials that are being purchased directly or using the waste paper as the main sources?
A: In current times, waste paper has become the essential material in the paper-making process.
Q: Compared to the traditional paper production process, what are the advantages of using recycled paper?
A: Technically, the two processes cannot be compared. This is because the raw materials that we have are different, as well as the current situation we are in. And to be honest, the government strongly recommends those industries use recycled paper to decrease the environmental issues in China.
Q: Can you be more specific to introduce the process of the general method of raw material recycling and extraction?
A: Firstly, all of the waste papers will be accumulated in the station and centralized. Then, they will be packaged into the recycling process. Secondly, the paper will be outputted into pulp by using specific machines, and the next process is as same as the regular patterns.
Q: What is the difference between the market positioning of recycled paper and original paper?
A: The recycled paper will be cheaper, and the original paper will be more expensive.
Q: What is the difference between recycled paper and original paper in the domestic application?
A: In the industrial system, we will prefer those recycled paper to make the cartons, packaging utilizations. For live use, it is more favorable to use toilet paper and window paper. However, some people will prefer using recycled paper in daily work. For the high standard use, they still prefer the original paper-making.
Q: How does the industry solve the discharge problem of pulping wastewater and recycled paper wastewater?
A: It depends on the condition of the materials. For the solid materials, they can be recycled in the whole production. For the liquid, it is completed by the water treatment companies.
Q: Do you have any suggestions to improve the quality of the paper in production?
A: As we know, if the paper is recycled four to five times, its quality will become lower than before because the fibers become shorter and shorter. More importantly, those utilizations in daily life still required the high-pressure resistance that can package goods. Therefore, those papers will become useless after being recycled four to five times.
Q: What substances are harmful to the environment, and how to deal with them?
A: The pigment and organic materials still need to be recycled precisely. Moreover, the strong alkali in the waste liquid is difficult to be degraded as well.
To deal with those issues, I highly recommend people to improve their awareness of refuse classification, which will be advantageous for not only the quality of paper but also the environment.
Questionnaire survey
Welcome to our integrated human practice webpage! In this section, we will provide and analyze the data collected from our questionnaires and interviews. A total of 429 subjects completed our questionnaire. We believe that these data had provided a strong understructure for the direction of research and social acceptance. Acknowledgements:
We thank 问卷星 for providing the guidelines of this digital questionnaire. Our questionnaire consisted of 17 multiple choice questions. We divided our questionnaire to three sections. The first section is about the sample’s personal information, including 3 questions. These information were intended to help us analyze our results. For all questions in this section, there was one choice that is “confidential.” Through this method, we hope to protect the privacies of our samples as much as possible. The second section is about recycled paper, including 10 questions. The third section is about synthetic biology, including 4 questions. We made clear of our purpose at the start of the questionnaire in the picture following:
Section 1:
Question 1:
This question explored the gender of research sample. We wanted to understand which gender of population is more interested in our field of research and is willing to complete this questionnaire. We suspected a higher percentage of the sample to be women because previous research done by the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) revealed that women are more likely to pay attention and take part in environmental actions. We believe that our data supported this point as it is shown that men only consisted 41% of total gender reveled population. This piece of evidence may suggest that our later questions that has is related to environmental problems will be reflected in a more positive way. Meaning that our data in terms of gender will be slightly different from the average population.
Question 2:
This question focused on the age group of research. Our sample were under the age of 60 for 99% of sample. In the 60-year-old range, there were two extremes of below 18 and above 60. The age group below 18 could be explained by friends and classmates of us. This group of people will be exposed to the future advances of technology and are more related to the recycled paper. The age group over 60 had a high percentage could e explained by the fact that they simply have more free time to do such questionnaires. The middle age group’s low participate rate could be explained for that they have to spend more time on their work and field of study and often spend less time doing questionnaires.
Question 3:
The last question was designated to see the sample’s level of education. This was an extension from the previous section. We see a small different between the number of samples’ education level to high school and below and age of below 18. The other portion of education level were are graduated or master’s degree and higher. This means that our samples were all highly educated. We suspect this to be that the more educated population are going to understand our questionnaire in a more comprehensive way. At the same time, most of the people we know are educated like us. Here, we are not stressing that the less educated population do not care about environmental issues, they have their own ways of saving the world, but they do not have the ability to understand many things we are trying to do; Therefore, we have later developed an education section for our human practice to teach others about our project.
Section 2:
Question 4:
This question is about the frequency of people recycling paper in speciality. In this question, 49 of 429 people selected the option of “Almost every time”, they takes the proportion of 11.42%; 110 of 429 people selected the option of “Often”, they takes the proportion of 25.64%; 208 of 429 people selected the option of “Seldom”, they takes the proportion of 48.48%; And 62 of 429 people selected the option of “Never considered”, they takes the proportion of 14.45%. The result can be indicated that about half of the interviewees have the habit of collecting and recycling paper in their daily life, but the proportion of the interviewees still need to improve in order to protect the environmental health.
Question 5:
This question is about people’s opinion of the meaning of recycling paper affects on the environmental protection. In this question, 389 of 429 people selected the option of “Necessary”, they takes the proportion of 90.68%; 29 of 429 people selected the option of “Meaningful but not necessary”, they takes the proportion of 6.76%; 7 of 429 people selected the option of “Less meaningful”, they takes the proportion of 1.63%; And 4 of 429 people selected the option of “Meaningless”, they takes the proportion of 0.93%. This question can be interpreted that almost all interviewees have the consciousness of the benefit of paper recycling and think it’s important to recycle paper to protect the environment.
Question 6:
This question is about the condition of people’s perceptions of recycled paper. In this question, 17 of 429 people selected the option of “Have deep perception, once especially made or researched”, they takes the proportion of 3.96%; 204 of 429 people selected the option of “Have some perception”, they takes the proportion of 47.55%; 184 of 429 people selected the option of “Have little perception”, they takes the proportion of 42.89%; And 24 of 429 people selected the option of “No perception”, they takes the proportion of 5.59%. From this question, we can see that the public don’t have really comprehensive or professional understandings about the recycled paper, so there are some biases of their attitude toward the function and effect of recycled paper. It also shows the importance to propagandize the recycled paper.
Question 7:
This question is about the ways for people to know the recycled paper, and this question only opened to the interviewees who didn’t select the option “No perception” in the Question 6. In this question, 234 of 405 people selected the option of “The propaganda from government or commonweal organizations”, they takes the proportion of 57.78%; 85 of 405 people selected the option of “Monetization website promotion”, they takes the proportion of 20.99%; 144 of 405 people selected the option of “School propagation”, they takes the proportion of 35.56%; 96 of 405 people selected the option of “Other people’s introduction”, they takes the proportion of 23.7%; And 42 of 405 people selected the option of “Others”, they takes the proportion of 10.37%. From this question, we can indicate that the most of public perceptions are from official social propagation.
Question 8:
This question is about people’s attitude about the meaning of easing over-cutting of trees by promote recycled paper, and this question only opened to the interviewees who didn’t select the option “No perception” in the Question 6. In this question, 234 of 405 people chose the option of “Necessary, and it can largely improve this issue”, it takes the proportion of 57.78%; 157 of 405 people chose the option of “Meaningful but not necessary”, it takes the proportion of 38.77%; And 13 of 405 people chose the option of “Less meaning, it won’t bring the effective improvement”, it takes the proportion of 3.46%; And 0 interviewee chose the option of “meaningless”in this question. From this question, we can see that the public holistically consider that the promotion of recycled paper has some meanings and effects on solving the over-cutting issue.
Question 9:
This question is about people’s attitude on some main disadvantages of recycled paper, and four options are listed: “Rough texture and poor writing experience””Thin and crisp paper, which is not conducive to preservation””The paper color is yellowish and is not suitable for writing”and “The process is complex and the cost is high”, and this question only opened to the interviewees who didn’t select the option “No perception” in the Question 6. The support rates of four disadvantages are all below 25%, but the opponent rate of the option ”The paper color is yellowish and is not suitable for writing”(170 of 405/41.98%) is obviously higher than other’s opponent rates. From this question we can see that the public generally not considered that recycled paper has obvious disadvantages, especially that it is not suitable for reading.
Question 10:
This question surveyed people’s attitudes toward the advantages of recycled paper, and this question only opened to the interviewees who didn’t select the option “No perception” in the Question 6. Four advantages are listed: Save the forest resources, Produce with low pollution, Low cost, Color is eye-protected. Obviously, Save the forest resources and Produce with low pollution received the over-half support rates, they are 93.83% and 64.94% respectively. It shows people’s general perception on the advantages of recycled paper.
Question 11:
This question is about what fields that interviewees would like to use recycled paper, and this question only opened to the interviewees who didn’t select the option “No perception” in the Question 6. The printed paper, newspaper and draft paper received the over-half support rates, they are 56.05%, 76.54% and 90.12% respectively. The public show the favourite of recycled paper on the draft paper field.
Question 12:
This question requires the interviewees to select three main factors that would influence their propensities when they are choosing different paper. Three factors received the over-half support rates, they are Tenacity, Texture and Price. And their support rates are 51.52%, 79.49% and 71.79% respectively.
Question 13:
This question surveyed whether people would support the related activities of recycled paper. 419 of 429 people supported and 10 of 429 people opposed, they take the proportion of 97.67% and 2.33% respectively. It shows the public’s passion and support on paper recycling.
Section 3:
Question 14:
This question began our search for the level of understanding about synthetic biology. The result showed a majority (more than 80%) of the sample having limited understanding to this subject. This result is reasonable since that for someone that doesn’t major in biology, chemistry or related subjects, their understanding of synthetic biology will only be at high school level (understanding basic mechanisms). However, I do believe that there are defects of our phrasing of the question, as that we did not explain what the boundaries for “decent understanding” is and “limited understanding” is. But our results still reflects that there is a need for a bigger population to understand synthetic biology.
Question 15:
This was an exception of a multi-answer question where the samples were to pick how they came to know synthetic biology. We believe that this question will help us gain knowledge of how we could educate others. As expected, about 50% of the samples stated that they had learned some synthetic biology through the internet. The subject we are asking is relatively unconventional that had only emerged in recent years to the public view especially in China. Internet being also a new trend since the 21st century, helped people today to learn things at expeditious speed. Our data also showed a high percentage choosing school education and nonprofit advertisements. This revealed that society are becoming more and more aware of this field of study.
Question 16:
This question seeks to understand how willing people are to participate in activity of synthetic biology. 70% of the samples were willing to participate. We found this number higher than expected since that not everyone is interested in synthetic biology and that they also have their own business to do. But we were also happy to see that many have this enthusiasm towards this subject.
Question 17:
This last question touched on the things that would attract one to such activity mentioned in the previous question. It was meant to help us better organize our activities. We found that majority of the people wanted to learn the applications, possible future and experiment theories of synthetic biology while not many wanted to learn about related subject’s history. This fits well with our project as that we are doing something new that could help the society. However, both question 16 and 17’s result could be influenced if our sample’s age group or education level was different. But overall, we see a general support to what we are doing.
At last, we believe that our questionnaire was successful in determining the general public’s view on recycled paper and synthetic biology. We find that there are defects in the current recycled paper that should be fixed and that many are looking forward to this kind of technology. These data explained the necessity of our research and led the direction to what kind of improvements are needed. We also found that synthetic biology is still a subject of unknown by many meaning that education is needed. We were happy to see that many are willing to take part in activities to learn more about this subject. This questionnaire had also helped us to plan our activities based on the samples’ needs.
