The concept of environmental protection should be cultivated in one's childhood. Just considering this, we arranged a small education lecture for the kids in one kindergarten located in Beijing, mainly about different kinds of waste especially plastics, and the correct methods of collection for them.

In the first part of the lecture, we played an drawing game with the children. In this game, the kids were required to draw the wastes in their opinion on paper and introduce them to us. Undoubtedly, it is beneficial for them to express a simple understanding of environmental protection and also raised their interest to follow us to enter the scientific world of plastics. The fact showed that children were willing to share themselves and quite curious about what we were going to tell them.

In the second part of the lecture, we conveyed some scientific knowledge covering the fields of refuse classification, plastic degradation, and PET degrading enzyme. Since some professional terms would confuse the children, we had prepared some analogies that were easier for them to understand. For example, we compared PET degrading enzyme to a bottle of magic potion, which could transfer the plastics to something friendly to the environment. Meanwhile, in our statement, signal peptide PelB and colistin-releasing protein Kil were just like some skilled workers who had the ability to speed up the production of ‘magic potions’. The children said they understood and showed great passion for having an interesting discussion with us.

Indeed, it might be difficult for children to fully develop environmental awareness from childhood and understand our project completely. However, we thought this kind of lecture was very valuable because it can help children start to develop awareness and pay more attention to the topic.

The lecture specialized for the elderly are also important, for the fact that many old people in Beijing completed socialization in the era of big industry and their scientific concept of development and awareness of environmental protection is relatively weak. According to our survey results, elder people actually use plastics very often but most of them lack the knowledge of plastic recycling and degradation.

On July 29^th, we went to a local elderly community college to conduct a lecture, and surely our major audience was mainly middle-aged and elderly people. Considering their various educational background, it was necessary for us to simplify some expressions and make the knowledge easier for understanding.

Firstly, we presented the harm plastic pollution had to our environment, including the harm to air, water, biodiversity, etc, through pictures and data, which we considered more visual-friendly for the elderly. And then, we introduced the various methods of plastic recycling and degradation with the help of several slides, both covering the advantages and problems that remained, respectively. Taking the method of PET enzymatic degradation as an example, it is relatively friendly to the environment while the production and degradation efficiency of enzymes need to be improved urgently..

In the second main part, we introduced the principle of our project that uses signal peptide PelB and colistin releasing protein Kil to establish an efficient secretion system of PET degrading enzyme in Escherichia coli BL21 (DE3), so as to improve the enzyme production. The elderly were very interested in this project, especially those who had worked in the plasticizing industry. They exclaimed at the progress of modern science and technology and thought that this technology was almost impossible under the previous extensive industrial production mode. They highly evaluated the market value and environmental protection value of our project.

In Beijing, the elderly as the core of community culture, were the potential to drive the environmental protection concept among regional residents. Therefore, we hope our presentation could raise awareness of the elderly and then through them, could influence people around.

Our educational video is about the harm of plastics to the environment, shooting for the popularization of science. It also includes the disadvantages of the current way of dealing with plastics and the limitations of degrading enzymes nowadays.

Regarding the video style, we decided to produce a hand-painted animation, which will be more attractive and easily understandable so as to attract more audiences and increase the impact and popularity.

At the level of contents, this video simply answers the questions ‘what is PET and what are the problems with it?’ and ‘how we will improve the method of PET degrading?’.Through intuitive animation, even the audience with low educational background can easily understand the principles and pieces of knowledge. We added our project introduction inside the video by personifying our enzyme to demonstrate how our enzyme works and degrades plastics. Therefore, this video does not only achieve public education but also promotes our team and project to the general public. This video has been published on Bili Bili which is the most popular video social media platform in China and is also served as the promotional video of our team published in the iGEM Video Universe.

We hope that through the video, the public can pay attention to the problem raised by the overuse of plastics and the mishandling of plastic waste. This video will bring the public a simple understanding of the current research objectives and our work.

To expand the influence online, we have established our own WeChat Official Account and published some scientific articles on our topic and synthetic biology. Besides these, we also posted our daily work to maintain a close communication with our followers.

In the first post, we took together the birth of our team, in the process of which they wil be able to know what is our project about and the original ideas of our team name, logo, slogan and products for fundraising. Especially for the team name , we explained that the PET in team name represents the object of our research, ‘DE-’ represents degradation and ‘er’ just means all the team members. The creative idea of our team logo is also interesting that it shows the ablating state of a small plastic bottle, which implies the theme of the project. Through this article, we introduced ourselves and hope to attract more people to further follow our updates.