Integrated Human Practices

Building The Project

This led to us getting in touch with the coolant suppliers. We contacted companies in India, some in Delhi, Ahmedabad and a few in Bangalore and realized that the majority of these suppliers do not sell any of the gases phased out in the recent amendement.

The next task was to identify the sources of these emissions. A few of us realized that the A.C.s require consistent repair and refilling of these coolants, suggesting a leakage in the set-up. To confirm this, we reached out to local repair mechanics, namely:

Moreover, a visit to a foam reclamation centre startled us, as these plants do not work on capturing the coolant content before processing the foam. This made us realize that the capture and degradation of these gases is to be done at the end level of the pipeline, i.e., degrade the emissions before they release into the environment, leading us to work on the development of a Bioreactor and, in future, efficient MOF (metallo-organic framework chips) to capture these emissions at the leakage levels.

Interestingly, these emission amounts did not exactly add up to the humongous emissions that were observed in the environment recently. We went back to the surveys and studies talking about the various contributors to these halocarbon levels in the environment. There we realized that a fair share of these emissions come from the cold transport industry, mainly marine vessels. We tried contact shipping companies about this. We managed to talk to a couple of people, a technical engineer and a vessel head, posted in the sea for a period of 6 months and 18 months respectively for cargo transport. The conclusion derived from the conversation was that although leakage is rare on ships when deployed; detecting these leaks and fixing them takes up nearly 10 to 15 minutes, which is sufficient to add greatly to emissions happening all across the world. According to the International Chamber of Shipping, there are currently more than 50,000 merchant ships operating in the oceans. Again the development of capture tubes will effectively reduce the environmental addition of these halocarbons.

After developing a possible solution to the problem at hand, we went ahead and approached Mr. Ian Crosby (formerly the Head of Sustainable Development and Cooling, Sustainable Energy for All). He helped us orient the project in a sustainable manner and gave an elaborate insight on the upcoming increase in cooling electronics sales in India, and other countries across the world. He helped us bring out the point of circular economy in our project and accordingly we kept in mind to develop the bioreactor design to minimise waste as much as possible and the same bioreactor model can be repurposed in future if the requirement ever fades out.

To comment on the sustainability of the implementation, we appproached Dr. Bhaskar Kura and got inputs on how to section our project and better align with the UN sustainable development goals better by suggesting modifications to our bioreactor design. 

We established contact with Mr. Unmesh Patil, (Member of Parliament, Jalgaon Loksabha Constituency). Provided his influential position as a policymaker, he could give us exact details of activities being carried out by various organizations. We presented him the loophole in the current policy and he applauded our efforts in identifying so. He further led us to Mr. Rajesh Patil, Commissioner of Pimpri Chinchwad, who is present at the implementation level. He suggested we reach out to the public and concerned authorities through media and education. We incorporated his suggestions into education segment of our project. Furthermore, we aired an hour long session on the All India Radio (AIR) Karnataka with Synthetic Biology and Climate Change to reach out to the public.

Anja Werntges from GIZ gave us inputs on the outlook of authorities regarding halocarbon destruction. The same concern was resonated by her colleague, Irene Papst, who said there is barely anything being done to ensure destruction of phased out coolants. Irene also provided us insights on how we could model our solution better and provided us ODS bank data that her team had collected.

Meeting with Ms. Irene Papst, GIZ

Lab and Cloning

We approached Professor Prashant Phale, IIT Bombay, whose inputs were very important for the initiation of lab work. We scheduled a meeting with him and received our chassis after a thorough discussion based on our requirements. He helped us with the culturing protocol and delivery of Pseudomonas putida. Not only our chassis, but our vector plasmids were supplied to us by SEVA (Standard European Vector Architecture) which was recommended to us by Professor Phale.

Meeting with Professor Prashant Phale

The contribution of Professor Wackett and Madison Bygd is indispensable. They helped us fix the problems with our assay set-up and suggested alternatives to the existing set-up we had, such as using teflon seals, which were very critical to prevent diffusion of the gases. He helped us figure out the possible mechanism of the enzyme action and degradation pathway.

Meeting with Professor Wackett and Maddy Bygd

Implementation

Initial proposal of bioreactor had plans of co-culturing two microorganisms together. We approached Professor Samay Pande, MCBL, IISc to study the co-culture of bacterial and microalgal colonies. Due to little study on Pseudomonas putida and presence of harsh chemicals (namely halocarbons) alongside, we decided to drop the co-culturing idea for the bioreactor.

Once we started to structure the bioreactor more concretely, we approached Professor G. Suraishkumar who gave the final shape to our current Bioreactor model. The solid state bioreactor is a result of his inputs. With the help of his student, Ms. Sonal Omar, we refined multiple aspects of this model.

Meeting with Professor G Suraishkumar

Meeting with Ms. Sonal Omar, Student of Prof Suraishkumar

Metallo-organic Framework (MOF): Regarding the framework and feasibility of the idea to capture halocarbons at the site of leakage using MOFs, we approached Professor Subinoy Rana, Materials Research Centre, IISc. He was able to help us with identifying the feasibility of implementing these structures. A follow up of this has been put on the Future Plans, under Implementation.

To get an entrepreneurial outlook for the implementation of our model, we visited the Bangalore Bioinnovation Centre (BBC) where we talked about the prospects of building a bench-scale of our idea. They appreciated our efforts and said they could provide lab space. We also visited a plastic recycling centre in sub-urban Bangalore. This gave us the motivation and data to model the economy of our bioreactor.

Education and Communication

We contacted Prayoga Institute of Education Research (PIER) and developed our education package focused on the rural population. The language was kept as simple as possible and was translated into the vernacular language, Kannada. Ms. Pratistha from PIER continuously suggested edits in the material over three cycles of edit and review. We finally prepared the material 'Sync' suitable for a general audience being introduced to biology and synthetic biology for the first time.

To make sure we succeeded with our goal on the comprehensibility of the material by general audience, we shared the material with our parents and close relatives and took their comments. This was incorporated to improve on the material on its parsability and comprehensibility.