Overview
With the ever-increasing demand for nickel, the scale of nickel mining and industrial processing will inevitably expand. Without timely awareness of nickel recycling, we risk facing catastrophic scenarios reminiscent of disaster films.
Therefore, we set our stage right between our two major conflicts: environment and industry. Coupled with our hardware, the engineered E. coli can efficiently recover nickel, turn them into microparticles, and remain contained.
Industrial Wastewater Treatment
Industries make use of the immense volumes of water of rivers or lakes to dilute the discharge wastewater. Though generally meeting emission standards based on local laws and regulations, the wastewater still contain varied amounts of heavy metal pollution.
We intend to set up buffer pools at wastewater outlets. The engineered E. coli will be incubated upon our hardware. The wastewater that normally would have been already discharged, will flow through our apparatus, with nickel being recovered on the way. After treating the buffer pool with our product, the wastewater can be released with even lower nickel concentrations. Our Hardware ensures that the nickel microparticle filled E. coli will remain in the buffer pools.
The nickel microparticles will sediment at the bottom of the pool, accumulate through time and form layers of nickel deposit. These reserves may be tapped into nickel shortage.
Commercialize
Environmental conditions of industries may vary across the globe. Some places might have temperatures too low for normal bacterial growth, some places might be exposed to more sunlight than others. To let our product adapt to a wider spectrum of environment, we plan to utilize the Anti-Freeze and Anti-UV modules from Fudan iGEM 2023 and confirmed in our hands during the winter training. We allow add-ons to be purchased to fit the needs of our customers. See more details in Entrepreneurship.
Safety Concern
As the application of our product moves beyond the containment of laboratories, certain safety measures are to be made. Our Hardware prevents the leakage of E. coli into the environment, and our Safety tests show that in the event of accidental release, the E. coli will not cause significant harm to the ecosystem.