Human Practices

iGEM Tec-Monterrey 2016 is based on the most heavily polluted city in Latin America. Amidst rampant consumerism and a dearth of civic action, we’re trying to light a spark that will ignite the fire of environmental consciousness.

Imagine a future where the well being of our planet is not taken seriously, where unawareness and indifference leads to contaminating millions of liters of water and our soils, producing lasting effects in human health and the environment. A world where economic interests shape our moral decisions and where the striking consequences of our actions are relentlessly ignored.

You don’t have to imagine anymore, that future is now. We are living in critical times, where the decisions we make this moment will crucially alter the way of life of future generations. It is said that if you don’t do something about it, you are part of the problem too. We chose to be part of the solution instead.

General Outline

When deciding what our project would be, a key element stood out from the others. We wanted to solve a real and pressing issue that our community faces day after day.

It wasn’t hard to come up with something: we just had to look at our cell phones, laptops, and tablets. We just had to look at the rivers of our city, polluted with TVs and toxic materials. We just had to look at the landfills competing with the mountains for the landscape of our city. We just had to look around our homes, and the answer was right there all along.

The electronic business is the fastest growing manufacturing industry nowadays, producing massive amounts of waste every year. The lifespan of electronics, such as computers and cellphones, is deliberately dropping and new devices keep arising to replace old ones. Consumerism and the unconsciousness of people cause the production of millions of tons of e-waste every year. Most of these residues meet their fate in landfills, where the hazardous substances within the waste end up being released, harming not only the environment, but also the health of civilians in surrounding communities.

After discussing and carefully pondering the effects that all of these issues have in our community, we, as a team, were deeply concerned about the current situation; we realized that we undoubtedly wanted to provide solutions outside the lab as well as inside it. In fact, we realized that our community needed someone and we were placed in the perfect position to do it.

In order to achieve this, we organized our Human Practice in an integrated feedback system: we approached stakeholders and the general community with the purpose of obtaining and analyzing data to assess the severity of the problem. Then, we involved our community in different events aimed to create consciousness about e-waste pollution and the dreadful consequences of incorrect e-waste disposal. We also wanted to inform as much people as we could about the different ways in which they could participate and come up with solutions to help us improve our current situation. Throughout this process, our experience allowed us to evaluate and reshape our project according to society’s needs.

The following is a general outline of the different events and activities we carried out as part of our Human Practices: