Integrated Human Practices

Background

Efforts in human practices start with the very inception of any iGEM project, and this couldn’t be more accurate. In our initial brainstorming, we first turned to the Sustainable Development Goals as formulated by the UN, and we decided to tackle Sustainable Cities and Communities, Climate Action, and Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure in our project. After some literature searching and further discussion, the topic of Living Building Materials (LBMs) spoke to us the most. LBMs are biological building materials in which microorganisms participate in the manufacturing of the material. Microorganisms can have many roles in such materials: they can contribute to the material by improvement of properties, by making the production process easier/bypassing certain steps, or by fully replace an established process by providing a more sustainable alternative [1]. LBMs, in our estimation, could be part of the solution when it comes to curbing CO2 emissions in the building and construction sector (see Project Description).

Who are the stakeholders?

After the inception of Project Pichitecture, it was important to us to hear the voices of various stakeholders that could be impacted by a broad implementation of our project. The implementation of our project reaches beyond the lab; the future of Pichitecture would involve the use of materials produced in industrial systems in architecture, infrastructure, and general construction. Thus, we had to consider who the stakeholders are on a global scale.

Research

Research in synthetic biology is vast, and researchers from many backgrounds are contributing to this field with their unique ideas. It was important to us to see the state of research in regards to our project idea and adjust based on existing literature. You can see our detailed literature list in our project description.

Fermenting Futures: Luckily, we were able to attend FERMENTING FUTURES, an exposition by Anna Dumitriu and Alex May in the Kunsthaus Wien. The intention of the exposition was to give an insight into yeast biotechnology from a cultural and aesthetic perspective by engaging the public in its history and in the future of these fermentation-machines. All the items shown were created with the help of yeat and biotechnological methods in the laboratory, a testament for the relationship between humans, yeasts and culture [2]. This project further solidified our plan to use the yeast Pichia pastoris as an excellent expression organism; being well-researched, widely used, and reliable, it was a great steppingstone for what we wanted to achieve. Especially the CO2-consuming strain of yeast that we have, it would contribute to our climate protection efforts on top of being easy to use.

image of the team at FERMENTING FUTURES — Team members and PIs attending FERMENTING FUTURES, following local COVID regulations at the time.

Government & Infrastructure

According to the official climate protection strategy and policy set by the Ministry for Climate Protection, Environment, Mobility, Innovation and Technology, Austria has pledged to reduce the CO2 emissions by up to 16% compared to 2005 until 2020 in the so-called non-emissions trading sectors, e.g. Building and Construction, Agriculture, and Transportation. This pledge was made as part of “Effort Sharing” spread amongst EU member states. According to this pledge, Austria has formulated related laws and policies [3].

Now that 2020 has passed, the EU is moving on to the next stage for the years 2030 and 2050. The European Parliament set the goal of emission reduction higher, from the initial 40% to 55%, in an effort to follow the goals of the Paris Agreement [4]. On top of that, the EU set the goal of climate neutrality by 2050, making it mandatory by solidifying it with legislation. As part of this effort, Austria intends to reduce CO2 emission by 36% compared to 2005, which may be further changed to 48% as an adjustment to the EU-wide change.

In view of these ambitious, but necessary goals, our project fits well in the movement for sustainable production and climate neutral building sectors.

Building and Construction

During our project, we have approached big industry players with our pitch. During these meetings, we managed to not only secure sponsorships and support, but insight into the industry perspectives. In Austria, construction companies and manufacturers have been increasingly looking towards sustainable alternatives and are open to supporting projects in the field of LBMs. Carbon capture, self-healing and avoidance of high heat or long drying phases have been frequently addressed in our conversations; these aspects are in line with our initial project idea.

However, firms in the building and construction sector stressed a very specific aspect most: the consideration of a circular economy. Not only should our material be sustainable in production, but it should also be easily reusable and should include underutilized waste products, if possible. These points were considered by us in the planning and conceptualization of our brick production, as seen in our Integration.

interview of Andreas Jäger on Zoom — Interview with Andreas Jäger, Head of International Product Management Wall bei Wienerberger AG, about the potential of our project

The Ultimate Consumer: The General Public

Building and construction impacts us all – thus the answer to the question “Who is our ultimate consumer?” is rather simple to determine: the general public, all ages and genders, are impacted by possible implementations and implications of our project. However, as simple as the answer may be, all the more difficult and important are the considerations of our project’s impact.

In our research, we leaned on the UN Sustainable Development Goals to determine how we should design our project and concept. Our sustainability considerations you can find here. Naturally, this was central to our integration.

Implementation of synthetic biology projects and potential release of GMOs outside of laboratory environment are frequently topics of public discourse, as many individuals and groups see irresponsible use of these methods as a potential threat to local communities, their health, or to humanity as a whole. To not leave these viewpoints out of our work, we conducted online and in-person surveys of the general public as part of our partnership with TU-Eindhoven, the results of which you can read on the respective partnership page.

Integration

Drawing from our interactions with stakeholders and our research, we integrated our insights in the process:

Considerations of a Circular Economy

Circular economy is defined as a model of production and consumption which involves sharing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing and recycling existing materials and products as long as possible. In practice, the goal of such a model is to reduce waste to a minimum [5].

For our project, it meant incorporating waste products and underutilized materials in our brick mixtures:

Lignin: We collaborated with IFA-BOKU research groups to investigate incorporating lignin-based glue into our bricks. Lignin is a highly underutilized waste product of the paper and pulp industry, which can be processed into a variety of products from lignocellulosic biomass [6]. Additionally, we investigated the effects of addition of pure/unpolymerized Kraft lignin on the brick mixture.

Sand: Sand is often used as an additional solid material in living building materials. However, many such experiments, and the construction industry, use solely river sand as it has more favorable properties. Desert sand, however, would be a more sustainable and more readily available alternative. Thus, we included desert sand into our brick mixtures.

Construction rubble: Not represented in our results as this is on-going work (hopefully we can show you the results at the Jamboree itself), but with the agreement of Wienerberger, one of your sponsors, we are set to receive a package of construction rubble, unusable in its current form in usual construction protocol. We hope to be able to find use for this waste in our mixtures.

Considering that the near future of LGMs is largely projected to be more as part of existing processes instead of fully replacing the status-quo [7], we believe these approaches to be promising contributions to circular economies in building and construction.

Considerations of Survey Results

After surveying the general public, we gained insight into a discrepancy between the state-of-the-art research in the field of synthetic biology and the knowledge of this field amongst members of the general public. This, to us, showed the importance for further research into this area, but also (at least partially) explained many biases against the implementation of synthetic biology in many aspects of our daily lives (anti-GMO movements being the most notable).

Thus, we wanted to avoid the incorporation of (even inactivated) GMOs in brick mixtures, if at all possible. Our sample brick mixtures do not include our main expression organism, Pichia Pastoris, and only incorporate cyanobacteria, which, in our current design, we haven’t genetically modified. Of course, the future concept (as represented by our design of Synechocystis plasmids) would involve GMOs in our brick mixture – for that to be a viable concept, further work on auxotrophy/kill-switch possibilities would need to be done; however, educational work needs to be done as to inform the public of synthetic biology so people can be comfortable with the use of genetically modified organisms in their daily life in a safe way.

To contribute to our communication effort, we extensively contributed to collaborations and partnerships set to bring information regarding synthetic biology to a wider audience via social media. We were also kindly invited by Exeter’s iGEM team BionExe to their podcast to tell about our project and iGEM experience.

EU Climate Pact: Lastly, our team leader joined the community of EU Climate Pact Ambassadors as part of making our outreach broader, as well as to connect our project and activism with other likeminded people. In this vein, our project was part of our Climate Pact Pledge [8]. Check out their profile as it should soon be online!