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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
