Sustainable Development Impact

Our Sustainability Efforts

In order to maxmise the sustainability of the project, we first delved into understanding what sustainability is. Sustainability refers to the property of being able to keep something for an indefinite time. It means our efforts should have lasting impacts which can keep making a difference. It also means we should look at the future: can our project still have positive impacts or are there any long-term effects we would need to consider? In other words, can our efforts contribute to a world that is livable, fair and good for us, the world around us and all future generations? Where a good world refers to overall wellbeing; mental and physical health; production techniques in which resources are available for all generations to come; and ecosystems that can thrive, showing high levels of biodiversity.

Collaborations

Creating such a sustainable wold certainly is a big task, and it is of course not something one team can accomplish. However, we believe that every stone counts and that we can make our own contribution to make the world more sustainable. We believe that the true power regarding sustainability lies in all iGEM teams working on building real world solutions that can collaborate towards this future. By all of us contributing in the best way we can to this common goal, we will together bring the world a big step closer to true sustainability.

Inner Development Goals

If we want to make the world a good place for all the future generations, we have to start with the current generation. We see a positive trend of more awareness and more caring societies. It is important to recognize the importance and urgency but also the complexity of current world problems. As we are convinced of the importance of collaboration, a systems thinking approach and a good life for the current generation, we are also a big supporter of the IDGs (Inner Development Goals) [1]. This is a framework for the inner skills needed for sustainable development. It focuses on human inner growth and development, which we believe are crucial for both individual well-being and societal dynamics. Within our team we also put a focus on well-being and team dynamics. We participated in a workshop on team dynamics led by Bram Jansens from Management Spark where we opened up to each other and learned about different personalities and behaviour styles. We followed another workshop on collaborative communication by our coach from Technovation Hub and focussed on equal participation during our team meetings.

Sustainable Development Goals

In the beginning of this page we tried to put into words what sustainability means for us. The UN Sustainable Development Goals concretise this idea of making the world a sustainable place by deciding on specific goals, targets and indicators that inform us about the state of the world. The SDGs are an inseparable and connected framework. Each goal is connected to the 16 other goals and none of the goals can be isolated [2]. Yet choosing a few SDGs as pillars to centre our work around allows us to be more concrete and from there expand to address the other SDGs as well. We have chosen goals 5, 12, 15 and 17 as our pillars.

Positive effects:

We set up an interview series with women in science to give them visibility, thereby reducing implicit bias and reducing the gender gap in sciences. More information about this can be found in our inclusivity guide . Additionally, we made a clue-based game highlighting important women in science. With this game we hope to give these influential women a face and again show girls that they can be great scientists as well. Striving for gender equality is important in all domains, including bioremediation as it interplays with a lot of other factors. We learned for instance from Defne from the KU Leuven KICK Supetai project how they are promoting entrepreneurship among the women in the village where they are active while tackling environmental challenges at the same time. In order to truly move to a sustainable world, equality in all fields is a necessity.

Negative effects:

We tried to make our interview panel for our interviews as diverse as possible. Yet as the percentage of female researchers at our university is already very low and the percentage of non-white researchers even lower, it proved very difficult to find women of different ethnicities. We realise that this lack of ethnic diversity may still leave young girls of colour without a role model. Yet we also hope that it might be a wakeup call to our university.

Positive effects:

A lot of the metals that are currently taken out of wastewater cannot be recycled and instead end up on a dumping ground. Here, due to leaching from rainwater, the metals can still get into the environment. With our technology, we hope that more metals can be recycled. The recycled metals can be used in other processes, so we don’t need to buy new metals, and we significantly reduce the release of these metals in the environment. Current techniques often use chemicals to extract the metals from the water; these chemicals will, with our technique, also be prevented from entering the environment. We also expect that for some metals our method can work in lower concentrations than current methods. As we expect that governmental regulations will become stricter, this will help companies to comply with them. By doing school visits and STEM workshops we aim to make people aware of the effects of metals in nature and how they can reduce their own pollution. By working together with the Supetai project in Kenya we envision that our technology can in later stages be used to treat wastewater from their well and that the metals can be recycled and sold. This promotes entrepreneurship especially for the women in the village community.

Negative effects:

Sometimes certain metals can already be recycled, but only by certain companies that have the possibilities for it. Therefore, these are not the companies that we are mainly focusing on. There are still a lot of other companies that cannot recycle them yet and the poorer communities that have wastewater left will also not have the facilities to recycle it. Also, for some treatments the conventional methods might still be cheaper, which is why we propose our method as one part in a longer process of steps. It can for instance be used as a polishing step or for one specific metal that is more difficult to treat with other methods. This is also what stakeholders in industry proposed to us. You can find more information on our human practices page. With regards to the supetai project we would first need to do more tests to decide on the costs and efficiency of the metal recycling before we can be sure that this will be lucrative for them.

Positive effects:

Life on land is a very broad SDG. It is about the health of fauna and flora, including humans, and about the health of whole ecosystems, including freshwater ecosystems such as rivers, wetlands and lakes. We have to take responsibility for the lands that we already occupy and we have to recognise that we need nature for its many ecosystem services [3] and inherent value. By being able to recycle metals we will not have to obtain so many metals by traditional mining methods thereby reducing the number of new mines that are being built and saving land for nature where biodiversity can thrive. Furthermore, the metals from industry will not get into the environment anymore, which means that their toxic effects on the local aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems and human health are prevented.

Negative effects:

We are working with genetically engineered bacteria and the impact of having them in an ecosystem is always unpredictable. Therefore, it is important to have a failsafe in place to make sure that our bacteria do not enter the environment. We propose multiple containments and a possible kill-switch mechanism to reduce any risks. Furthermore we use lab strains which are unlikely to survive outside laboratory conditions.

Positive effects:

As we discussed already, we believe that collaboration towards a sustainable world is the most impactful initiative. Our collaboration with the KU Leuven KICK Supetai team provided key insights into the real-world application of our technology. Through our discussions, we explored sustainable uses of our solution in a Kenyan village, where the Supetai team is addressing water contamination issues. They had solved the problem of high fluoride levels in drinking water using membrane filtration, but the process concentrated harmful chemicals and metals in the wastewater, posing new risks to nearby wells. This challenge highlighted the need for a sustainable solution without relying on electricity, making our bacteria-based technology a potential fit. Their experience also deepened our understanding of the complexities of water treatment and reinforced the importance of addressing contamination. By collaborating with the Supetai team, we not only contributed to solving their challenges but also gained valuable perspective on the human and environmental aspects of water contamination. This motivated us further to refine our project. We were able to meet, and exchange valuable insights on the potential sustainable impact of our project, with a lot of other teams, during meetups and individual meetings. We also established collaborations with the Athens and CNPEM-BRAZIL teams, centered on sustainability.

Negative effects:

With working together with a lot of people there are also challenges to overcome. It requires very clear communication and open discussion in which everyone can be heard. It is often easy to assume a certain direction, but if a lot of people work together these directions might not be aligned. Therfore talking about the common goals and defining a direction that everyone is comfortable with is crucial to avoid the collaborations to crash in the long run. When collaborating with other teams, it is also important to remember the limitations and humanness of the other team. It is easy to want to do a lot of things, but these are always dependent on outside influences. Do not blame your partners when things do not work out but try to search for a solution together and recognise the good-will and effort of your partners. If we can do this, we believe that collaborations can achieve beautiful results in the long run. Additionally, we tried to organise our own virtual meetup around water treatment where we invited keynote speakers , iGEM teams and other organisations to come together, talk about water treatment, learn from each other and be inspired to work on this common goal, but unfortunately this did not succeed. We trouble shooted our efforts in our contributions page so that next teams have some tips to succeed in organising their meetup.

References

[1] Inner Development Goals. (n.d.). Framework. https://innerdevelopmentgoals.org/framework/

[2] United Nations. (2015, September 27). Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda

[3] Scotland's Nature Agency. (2023, July 11). What are Ecosystem Services? https://www.nature.scot/scotlands-biodiversity/scottish-biodiversity-strategy-and-cop15/ecosystem-approach/ecosystem-services-natures-benefits

Stakeholder Engagement

We described some examples already of how the KU Leuven KICK Supetai project helped us in looking at how we can use our technology to help real world communities. We learned about this from Ernenek Duran from One Drop and we talked with stakeholders in industry. We asked them if our project would help should it work and specifically asked for input in how to make it more sustainable. We also talked with the Flemish Environmental Agency (VMM) to find out more about regulations and the current state of pollution in Flanders. For our inclusivity efforts we talked to organisations which contributed to our gender equality efforts, such as Greenlight for Girls, BeWise and the professors we interviewed on women in science. More information about this can be found on our Human Practices page. We would like to especially thank Griet Ceulemans who teaches sustainability courses at our university and was happy to advise us on our sustainability efforts and bring us in contact with the IDGs.

SDGs Impact Assessment

The SDGs are one whole and inseparable. Even though we center our work around a few SDGs, it is important to keep the full picture in mind. In order to make sure that we had considered all of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, we evaluated our project against all the targets.