Team:Cornell/project/hprac/environment

Environmental

Impact of Styrofoam

Although our research can be applied to a variety of industries, we chose to first focus on one of the top environmental issues of today: the pollution generated by Expanded Polystyrene Foam, commonly known as Styrofoam. The Environmental Protection Agency has identified Styrofoam as the fifth largest creator of waste. Over 14 million tons of polystyrene are produced globally each year. In one lifetime, we produce more polystyrene than 3.5 times the weight of all 7 billion people on earth. Even though the United States accounts for only 4.45% of this population, we are responsible for producing around 21% of the world’s polystyrene. Of these 3 million tons, 2.3 million end up in landfills, while the remainder finds its way to masses of water. Americans throw away 25 million Styrofoam cups a year, which is around 82 cups per person. When left in a landfill, Styrofoam takes over 500 years to degrade, composing at least 30% of every landfill in America. The material is even more environmentally hazardous when it reaches a marine environment. The foam breaks into small pieces that wildlife often mistakes for food. Because the material floats, it easily pollutes coasts and shorelines, making it the second most abundant type of beach debris.

Over 200 cities across America have already banned the harmful substance. Most of these cities are located in the areas of California that border the Pacific Ocean. This year, Chicago began a “No Foam Chicago” campaign to pass similar legislation in the city. On February 14th, Bloomberg announced plans to ban the material in New York City. Soon after, the government of the state of Massachusetts made a similar proposal.

As the public awareness of the negative impact of Styrofoam rapidly grows, so does the demand for an eco-friendly substitute. Current alternatives are more recyclable than Styrofoam. However, when tossed into a landfill or waterway, they cause similar environmental damage. Based on this fact, we believe our research will be most effective in this application.

Genetically Engineered Packaging vs. Current Products

Recent reports on polystyrene production demonstrate the increasing demand for environmentally friendly substitutes. We hope to encourage this trend by improving upon Ecovative's existing material. To compare the eco-friendly material to its competitors, we used a rubric created by the Colorado Mycological Society that encourages researchers to develop a biodegradable substitute to harmful disposable products. The areas we researched include product toxicity, raw material toxicity, carbon footprint, biodegradability, and sustainability. Based on the following chart, it is clear that the environmental impact of the genetically engineered product is negligible compared to that of current mainstream materials.

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By genetically engineering the fungi used in the material, we will make the manufacturing process more efficient and, as a result, decrease the energy required to make the product.

CEA

As scientists, we are often inclined to reduce complex procedures down to simple, step-by-step protocols. Assessing risk and evaluating environmental impact are no exception; our instinct this year was to continue building upon the universal checklist that every environmental iGEM project could fulfill in order to ensure environmental safety, the idea being that we could easily and systematically find answers to questions of environmental safety in scientific literature. We followed the approach from our project last year: Comprehensive Environmental Assessment (CEA).

CEA differs from traditional methods of risk assessment by recognizing that risk assessment is fundamentally a decision-making process in which scientists, experts, and the public should be engaged. The goal is to foster transparent discussion and use collective judgement to evaluate limitations and trade-offs in order to arrive at holistic conclusions about the primary issues that researchers should address in their research planning.

While the Environmental Protection Agency primarily uses the CEA approach for nano materials, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., launched efforts to lay out a framework to apply CEA to synthetic biology. This groundbreaking project set out to assess the CEA approach's relevance to synthetic biology, in anticipation of the growing demand for synthetic biology-based solutions to global issues. They arrived at the conclusion that scientists should focus on four major areas of risk assessment: altered physiology, competition and biodiversity, evolutionary prediction, and gene transfer.

The Woodrow WIlson Center's Synthetic Biology Project recommended that CEA be applied to more developed projects that were approaching field deployment in order to evaluate it as a risk-assessment approach for synthetic biology at large. This is where we come in: can CEA be successfully used to evaluate the risks of releasing our genetically modified strains in the consumer market? What are its limitations?

We began by attempting to apply the Synthetic Biology Project's modified guidelines for prioritizing research questions to our own project as it currently stands. Above is a simplified schematic of our risk assessment approach, as adapted from the Woodrow Wilson Center. We hope that this framework will prove useful to other environmental iGEM teams in the future.

CEA allowed us to think about crucial future work for our project in order to make it suitable for use in the consumer market. However, in our interactions with environmental groups and small business owners, we encountered several important questions that were not built into the existing CEA framework.