As a part of the human race, our team is obliged to save our planet and vigorously fight against environmental pollution.
Critical environmental issues like plastic pollution may cost a community much time and effort to ameliorate. Therefore our end customers should not be limited to the lab and high environmental demand; our target customers are the local plants and organizations that process materials regularly. We are dedicated to make our two methods into reality, put our theory into practice, and create a product that serves as an outstanding alternative for other environmentally destructive approaches. Our team envisions that people can bio-decompose PET (the majority in the plastic waste) easily and effectively with our fusion protein and whole-cell catalyst of mLCC universally.
Improving our product’s practicability and understanding the current solutions and conditions of the industry, we host an in-depth discussion with the Ecological Environment Department of the Beijing E-town Urban Operation Bureau’s leaders. A great conversation of prospect and reality, The meeting benefits both sides greatly. As students, we know more about the current situations of plastic degradation. According to the information from the Bureau, when degrading the plastics, workers first classify the plastics into different levels by their quality. By doing so, we can effectively avoid unnecessary waste of good plastics and recycle the plastics that are still usable. After classification, workers use the physical recovery method to melt and reform plastics. The resulting product will also be utilized in a lower rank to assure its safeness and its quality. If the product cannot be downgraded, a chemical recycling procedure is required, yet secondary contamination will inevitably occur, and parts of it will undergo incineration and landfill, which may harm the environment to some extent. Therefore, biodegrading plastics have always been highly valued by the government. Because of the encouragement from the government and the increasing amount of researches, today biodegrading plastics are extremely promising and useful. After sharing our project, we received the Ecological Environment Department of the Beijing E-town Urban Operation Bureau’s unanimous confirmation and encouragement.
Despite the promising prospects of our product, it may have potential hazards. We create our products from biomaterials, and there is a risk that E.coli and Bacillus subtilis 168 that carry the antibiotic resistance gene may spread the genome in the environment, causing the proliferation of antibiotic resistance genes and granting bacteria resistance. Currently, we have to conduct our experiment with transgenic technology. Transgenic technology may risk damaging the environment, subsequently threatening people's health, granting plants drug resistance, and contaminating animals' inhabitants. As for the potential solution, we want to focus on soil toxicology test of Cell surface display of mLCC in Bacillus subtilis and cell surface display of mLCC in Bacillus subtilis.
Right now our challenge is to make our product the most tenacious vitality it can and overcome the potential difficulties we might encounter in the foreseeable future. For instance, Pilot Scale Production, the process of scale-up research using conditions consistent with production in pilot production, is a vital link that transforms scientific and technological achievements into productivity. But whether our ideas can be practical enough is still uncertain. However, there is no doubt that our approach indeed has a promising and bright future. Our teams are devoted to eliminate all the barriers ahead of us and contribute to our planet earth.
