As mentioned before, Newcastle has a large coal mining and shipping industry. As locals we are faced with coal mines, trains, and large ships on a daily basis. Additionally, like the majority of people in Australia we are faced with filling up our cars with petroleum on a weekly basis. We are all made well aware of the health dangers of fossil fuels and their environmental impact, and we wanted to do our part to combat this. By looking into work from our universities 2020 iGEM team and searching relevant literature we were able to understand how monoaromatic hydrocarbons can affect the environment and the population. We also discovered that traditional methods of remediation of contaminated sites is inefficient and damaging to the environment. Through further reading and discussions with academics and industry personnel we began to explore bioremediation as an alternative. Not only as Newcastle locals, but as inhabitants of this earth, we are responsible for the damage human mining and retailing of fossil fuels causes and as such we have a responsibility to restore contaminated sites to protect the health of ourselves and our environment.
DeNovocastrain BBQ and Survey
To rasie some intrested in our local community, the DeNovocastrains endeavoured in a good old fasion Bunnings Warehouse BBQ. Here we sold sausage sandwhichs in effort to spread some awareness aorund our project.The BBQ allowed for us to interact with everyday Australians and find out what they knew about bioremdiation and BTEX. We supplied posters with a QR code linking a basic 6 question survery. We rasied over $1,000AUD and recived 32 hits on our survery. The results are below.
