In Sustainability, we are aiming to solve pollution problems in the procedures of the fashion industry, such as environmental friendly pigments synthesis, sustainable dyeing method, color perception disabled, education imbalance and so on. We're at Quality Education, Clean Water and Sanitation, Sustainable Cities and Communities, Responsible Consumption and Production SDG sections have made certain contributions.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also known as the Global Goals, were adopted by the United Nations in 2015 as a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity.
The 17 SDGs are integrated—they recognize that action in one area will affect outcomes in others, and that development must balance social, economic and environmental sustainability.
Countries have committed to prioritize progress for those who're furthest behind. The SDGs are designed to end poverty, hunger, AIDS, and discrimination against women and girls.
The creativity, knowhow, technology and financial resources from all of society is necessary to achieve the SDGs in every context.
“Achieving inclusive and quality education for all reaffirms the belief that education is one of the most powerful and proven vehicles for sustainable development”
Tanshan Primary School was founded in 1962, located in the mountainous countryside, which is very remote. The towns in which they are located are mainly inhabited by some Chinese minority residents, mainly Miao and Zhuang. In 1996, the school was contacted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and received 54,000 RMB from the United Association of British Chinese Associations.
The "Cloud West online Volunteering Teaching Project" is one of parts in our SpringBuds avtivity for promoting Quality Education. It is an online auxiliary public welfare project carried out by Shuren college in SUSTech for left-behind children in southwest China. It aims to accompany the growth of those left-behind children and promote social attention to the growth of them with the help of the Internet technology platform. At the same time, it reduces the process cost and leads the public welfare boom of college students. The project is mainly led by Shuren college in SUSTech. Through the online teaching platform, school-run lectures + online pairing + online course platform, the left-behind children are given different aspects of knowledge in study and life.
Since May 2022, our team, SUSTech_Shenzhen 2022, has experienced online questionnaire registration and offline interview assessment, and finally successfully obtained the qualification to participate in this project. Then, in June and July, we designed a unique curriculum for the Grade 4 and Grade 6 children, showing them the wonderful world and providing them with a wealth of knowledge. Each class only has half an hour. So, how to fully mobilize children's interest and provide appropriate knowledge density in the limited time has become the first problem in our curriculum design process.
For the Grade 4 children, our class mainly adopted the design from the interesting knowledge of color, clothing manufacturing process and so on. On the basis of fully arousing students' interest, we added a lot of short stories about color. For example, why purple was particularly expensive in the ancient East and West, and what happened to its price before it dropped between them. Then, through some interesting video uploaded to Bilibili (Chinese YouTube), we played some color discrimination games. From a row of similar colors, you need to choose the most different color.
For the Grade 6 children, we focused more on the expansion of vision and the introduction of knowledge. We contacted traditional Chinese culture, especially the Book of Songs (the first anthology of verse in China, collecting poems from the 11th century BC to the 6th century BC), to introduce how clothes were dyed in ancient China. Then, based on the comparison of modern industrial dyeing methods, we proposed a synthetic biology method to synthesize dyes. Through the discussion with students, we have reached an agreement that the production of dyes by synthetic biology and the natural extraction of dyes from living organisms such as plants in nature are more environmentally friendly than chemical synthetic dyes. Finally, we return to other applications of synthetic biology in life, such as space, food, fuel, and so on, while stimulating children's interest in biology.
Through the organizer, our team collected the feedback of the children who attended the class and the management teachers who together attended the class with them, and received unanimous praise.
The organizer of this activity thought that we can fully consider children's acceptance ability in addition to professional knowledge, and adjust our teaching plan appropriately, so that children can not only understand the colorful world outside the mountain they live, but also learn more knowledge in the fun.
“Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all”
Our final goal of promoting Tyrian Purple Evolution (TPE) project is to replace the chemical dye production. The chemical synthesis mainly has two parts of environmental pollution, leading to the social issue of water pollution released by chemistry factories. First, most chemical methods use bromine gas or hydrogen bromide for bromination, but they suffer from lack of regiospecificity, low product yield and environmentally toxic manufacturing processes. Second, when synthesis is started from brominated precursors, the high cost of these precursors becomes an obstacle for large-scale synthesis. Therefore, the bromination process is still too inefficient and uneconomical to be feasible on an industrial scale for either biological or chemical synthesis of 6BrIG.
With our TPE project, tyrian purple is synthesized with the non-polluting substrate tryptophan (Trp) and efficient enzymes in E.coli strains. The whole process is much more sustainable and environmental friendlly than the way of chemical synthesis.
“Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”
Synbio synthesis of tyrian purple is a sustainable and highly efficient enzyme-linked reaction with non-polluting and accessible substrate tryptophan (Trp).
And we made optimization in dyeing method, so it will not consume a huge amount of water to dying, bleaching and fraying, which is releasing toxic chemicals in the rivers and posing a horrendous threat to the environment and public health.
Besides, the related industries can also benefit from our environmental protection projects. For example, with a sustainable dyeing method, the clothing bands will sell more by promoting the concept of enviromental friendlly clothes. And workers in factories wil gain a safer working environment with no occupational diseases induced by polluted water and air.
Our TPE project cares every resident on the earth and hope to achieve a sustainable community.
“Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns”
The traditional method in producing dyed clothes consumes prodigious amounts of hazardous chemicals and water while dying, bleaching and fraying, posing a horrendous threat to the environment and public health. To make it worse, many irresponsible factories with poor sewage disposal system dump the wast water directly into the river, among which the poisonous substrates can transport to and accumulate in places far away from their original source.
Unlike most dyes, tyrian purple does not covalently bind to cotton, but instead adsorbs to the fibers. Thus, the glucose moiety we introduced into the synbio synthesis pathway serves as a biochemical protecting group, stabilizing the reactive indoxyl in the reduced state until treatment with a β-glucosidase. Accordingly, indican provides many desired attributes for a dye: in addition to water solubility and stability over a broad range of pH and temperatures, indican provides spatial and temporal control over indoxyl formation for direct dyeing of cotton fibers. Thus, the huge amount of flowing water will not be wasted during dyeing.
https://sdgs.un.org/goals