Team:Paris Bettencourt/Practices
Human Practices
Human Practices are a noticeable part of iGEM and more broadly of synthetic biology and science. The idea behind Human Practices is to investigate how our work will influence the world, what impact it will have and what good could the society benefit from it. It starts by reverse thinking, how the world influence your work? What problem(s) does our project tackle? Our project, Frank&Stain, is to find a biological way to degrade wine pigments, anthocyanins. But why caring so much about stains? Wine stains, among other stains, are difficult to remove after some time and people usually send their stained clothes to dry cleaners.
PERC
Dry cleaners use Perchloroethylene, a highly efficient solvent to remove stains. Perchloroethylene (or tetracholorethynlene or PERC) is the main chemical found in products used for dry cleaning worldwide. It is volatile, highly stable and non-inflammable, and quite cheap and effective also, reasons why it is so wildly used in the industry. However PERC has been found to be toxic, both for health end environment. PERC is a volatile compound, so it can enter the human body through the respiratory track and dermal exposure. People exposed to PERC experienced sleepiness, ataxia, headaches and even seizures and coma after a short exposition; as for longer periods of exposition to PERC, people may display neurobehaviour changes, memory loss, loss of attention and loss of vision. The WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified PERC as 2A carcinogen, meaning it is “probably carcinogenic to humans”, and studies show that the central nervous system is one of its primary targets. PERC can also causes skin irritation, and animal studies show that it increases the risk of developing Parkinson disease, liver tumors and kidney tumors. Exposure to PERC for long periods can also lead to a higher risk of developing other types of cancer like bladder cancer, multiple myeloma and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
PERC is also a threat to environment. Most part of the contamination goes directly into the atmosphere and PERC tends to volatilize quickly in water and or soil; but some may remain in water and soil and migrate. It can thus contaminate groundwater. Therefore France (with USA and Denmark) has decided to ban this compound, in 2022.
Now what alternatives will there be for stains removal? How does it affect dry cleaners and their customers? These questions inspired us to make a survey, as a first step in Human Practices part of our project. It also allows us to investigate people’s knowledge on synthetic biology. Communication with the public is also e vary important matter in science, and we participated in a few events to exchange on our project with scientists and non-scientists. Finally, we collaborated with other iGEM teams.
Questionnaire for Dry Cleaners
To assess the level of awareness of dry cleaners and customers, we created a survey. We submit it to every dry cleaners in Paris, to obtain the best statistics and most global idea on dry cleaners’ opinions we possibly can. We want to know what problems they encounter the most and how we, an iGEM team, can help them.
We went to every dry cleaners in the 20 arrondissements in Paris, which makes it exactly 462 dry cleaners. We asked which stains are the most difficult to remove and/or the more frequent, to confirm that tackling wine stains was on point. We also asked them on which fabrics it is more difficult to remove stains, as depending on the fabrics stains go deeply in it or not and there are also types of fabrics that are very fragile and need to be handle with great care. Then we asked specifically about wine stains, if they are difficult to remove and what products they use, leading to the question of them using PERC or not. Focusing on PERC we investigate their level of awareness on the compound and its effects on health and environment, and the fact that it is now banned in France, if they agree with this measure or not and what impact it will have on them, mostly economically speaking. Finally, we asked about any known alternatives, mostly bio-friendly alternatives, and how they think their customers could perceive such initiatives.
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igem2016parisbettencourt@gmail.com 