Human Practices
Human Practice Achievements
Our project was not limited to the workbench!
We passed the laboratory doors to meet experts and to face the reality in the field.
We had many fruitful conversations with an ecological engineer who advised us about the current pollution situation in environment.
A History doctoral student who enlightened us about the importance of metals throughout history for mankind and civilization!
We approached and got advise from an process engineering and biotechnology expert, who helped us to specify our process and to put it in the context of current industrial means available to biotechnologies.
We asked the University of Pretoria iGEM team to investigate for us the social issues and conditions of platinum mining, by interviewing experts.
Finally we shared our project and synthetic biology with the general public by participating in several public events and media presentations (website, radio, local written press).
Silver
We presented the synthetic biology toolbox to the general public, and how it could be applied to solve environmental problems such as in those in our project. More details on the Engagementpage. Those meeting allowed us to share our project with people with little knowledge of biology concepts... We presented synthetic biology to both children and their parents. Popularize our project was really interesting for us because we had to find new ways to explain it. Moreover our project was well welcomed by public and conversations with people was really motivating for us!
We also shared our project with people familiar with biology and their relevant question and interrogations were useful for us.
We wondered if this platinum problematic was characteristic to our century and to which extent such issues could have matter in the past. The History PhD candidate we interviewed learned us a lot of things about many subjects related to metals. That made us realize problems related to platinum have always existed in history of mankind: pollution, ownership of resources, work conditions, availability...
Gold
We considered the implications for platinum and metals recycling our process could have, asked experts for advice and researched where it could fit in the industrial sector. This work can be found on the Integrated Practices page.
The interactions we had here was really more focused in the scientific aspect of our project.
As we investigated on the wide range of available techniques able to perform our purpose (recover platinum) we wonder what would be the imperative in our process... While searching among uses of platinum in industry we found that nanoparticles was a very valuable form a platinum and increasingly used. So we focused our process in order to have nanoparticle as a final product.
The main question that we wondered was how to transpose our process (designed on a scale up) to the industrial scale. This is a tough question, and theoretical knowledge is not enough to answer the question. That why we contacted a expert in process engineering and biotechnology to advise us to determine the feasibility of our project. Hence he was really interested in our project we could have had fruitful conversations... Thanks to him we have been able to assess and estimate representative values of our project applied on a industrial scale (such as, yields, cost, prices, concentration factors, amount of raw materials needed .....). Moreover his recommendations has shape our project as we focused on the platinum recovery from sewage sludge which is a very advantageous process financially speaking.
As we didn't really know what was the actual situation in environment and what solutions are being developed to face metal pollution, we asked for advice to an ecologist engineer. He showed us to what extend the situation could be critical about metals pollution, that why we found our project relevant. Thanks to him we have chosen to design a process able to be connected to other process occurring in the environment. Indeed we made us discover a wide range of already existing environmental processes that could be followed by our process.
Thanks to all those people we had very interesting interactions
