The first thing that came to our team’s mind after pondering about how we should apply our project to the real world was campaign. The idea of our campaign was simple: "to make people become aware of the situation." Our team designed two steps to further elaborate the plan. Regarding that we all lived in dormitory, the sphere of activity was confined to our school. The first plan required participation of our school’s students. For three trash baskets in our school, we indicated a different basket only for plastic. After two weeks, our teammates gathered every plastic basket that we put and sorted the trash just in case there were wastes other than plastic. The image below is the how the waste baskets looked when we put it together.
After we were done sorting, we packed plastics for our next step.
The next step was the crux of our campaign. For our project of IGEM fundamentally aimed for seeking ways to save the environment, we designed our next step to appeal to many students as possible of our project. We believed environment was something that all people should be concerned with. Our team created posters that showed the dire situation of ocean wastes such as Great Pacific Garbage Patch. To visualize, we placed the plastics that we gathered on an open space of our school. Students were able to see what we were doing and our team explained to the students of our project.
The first campaign was successful in starting our project with participation of many students. We believe the essence of was in making people aware of the situation. Our team hopes this campaign will be a starting point for contributing further to any environmental activities.
HAFS Mini Forum
Our project aimed to find a solution in environmental issues, particularly focusing on plastic wastes. The solution we were able to find was “mealworms”. By figuring out a mechanism that enables mealworms to degrade not only Styrofoam but also PET, we progressed our project, focusing on environmental issues with different public engagements. Through different means of approaching the public, such as campaigns, fundings, lectures and et cetera, we stressed the importance of acknowledging such problems and our project itself.