Throughout the course of our project, we have engaged in various Human Practices efforts, which we integrated into components of our project. We consulted with key stakeholders, such as a farmer, catering services and market waste management, as well as constructed resources to shape our project’s direction, such as market segmentation analysis and Biowaste Encyclopedia. Moreover, we reflected upon our project’s initial values which continuously shifted during the course of our project in response to our Human Practices findings.
To gain an understanding of bio-waste production and management in the agricultural industry, our team invited Mr Peter Heilman, a farmer from our state of New South Wales.
As the agricultural industry was a major source of bio-waste production we had identified, Mr Heilman, as a primary-industry producer, represented a key stakeholder group of our project. Hence, we wanted to gain an understanding of the current methodologies and challenges the farming industry faces with bio-waste management, and explore the viability of our project.
As most of our team is not from a rural background, we gained a new perspective on how farmers view bio-waste, as many of them considered bio-waste as an input to the organic matter cycle, rather than mere waste matter. In fact, Mr Heilman told us that AUD $50 per hectare worth of nutrients were inside the crop stubble remaining in the ground, available to the crops in the following year.
However, despite this value and potential of bio-waste, we learned that due to the lack of appropriate machinery to sow through the waste matter and relatively low industry demand, crop stubble burning was a prevalent practice. This aligned with the problem of the status quo that we had initially identified, as it contributes to pollution and greenhouse gas production.
We also discovered the realistic challenges of sending bio-waste to external companies for recycling, with logistics issues of organising trucks, cost of shipping, and collecting the bio-waste in the first place.
Despite these challenges, Mr Heilman stressed the importance of value-adding in the agricultural sector. He explained that the trend over the last two decades is that farmers are trying to extract every cent of the product to maximise profit, giving the example of substandard oranges being crushed and extracted for juice, as well as citrus oil from the peel. This presented a promising opportunity for our project as these end users are eager to adopt our vision of efficient biofuel generation.
We conducted an interview with Mr Jonathan Coatley, a Catering Manager for Chartwells at The King’s School. Chartwells is a food catering company with a specialty in providing meals for educational institutions, and is catering for over a couple thousand students and staff members in The King's School dining hall for breakfast, recess, lunch and dinner. Hence, our team identified them as one of the key stakeholders of our project, as a producer and processor of large volumes of bio-waste on a daily basis and on a large scale.
We interviewed Chartwells to gain a better understanding of the bio-waste profile and processing in our local school community, with a focus on food waste. We were surprised to discover that despite their large-scale operation at the school, they only produced 5kg of pre-production waste and 50kg of post-production waste, which is equivalent to under 1% of total food consumption.
We learned about the waste management procedures taken by Chartwells, to understand which component of the cycle our project would best fit in. Chartwells collects all the food waste, then measures its weight and logs it into a tracking system. The waste is then sorted by an external company and parts of it are put in the school’s worm farm, breads and grains are fed to chickens in the school’s farmyard, and a minimised amount of bio-waste is taken by a truck to landfill.
We were surprised to discover the immense amount of sustainability considerations taken into account by Chartwells, but identified several key steps in their bio-waste management processes that we could incorporate our project in.
Because general food waste (e.g. food scraps, post-production consumer leftovers) contains a mixture of a wide variety of biomass sources in a relatively unpredictable composition, our engineered E. coli would most benefit from growing on clearly identified biomass sources. We identified the pre-production waste and display leftovers stage to be viable waste sources for our bacteria, as they are generally not contaminated or mixed with other, random food waste.
We presented our project idea to Mr Coatley to consult his perspective on its viability and the overall level of acceptance of synthetic biology solutions within industrial applications. We learned that sustainability is one of the important key performance indicators (KPIs) targeted by food supply and catering companies, and companies would be willing to adopt solutions to help reach their sustainability goals and establish a closed-circuit operation. However, Mr Coatley stressed the importance of bacterial containment, especially within a food processing environment.
To further understand how organic waste is processed on a commercial scale, we visited Sydney Paddy’s Market, one of Sydney’s biggest and oldest markets that sells everything from souvenirs to fresh produce. We were taken to an organic waste processing section beyond public access to view how waste was being managed in such a large environment.
We discovered that all organic waste from the fruit markets are collected at certain ‘green points’ located on the floor. We learnt that from there, the organic waste gets sent to either farms or landfill. However, before these bio-waste are delivered to farms, any plastic or non-degradable materials must be sorted and removed by hand from the bins.
This visit revealed both an opportunity and a challenge. It presented possibilities for the installation of biofuel generation systems at these ‘green points’ where large amounts of organic waste are collected, but it also highlighted the issue of non-degradable substances being mixed within the waste matter, which has to be removed by hand.
Inspired by the 2018 Valencia_UPV iGEM team’s Human Practices efforts, our team performed a market segmentation analysis that compared and evaluated various classes of end users: catering services, farmers, and food processing facilities.
We gave them a score based on marketability and viability, and discovered that farmers were the most suitable end user class for our project, slightly above catering and food processing services.
These results were integrated into our project vision and implementation ideas as we identified the agricultural sector to be the most suitable target end user class. Hence, in combination with the Biowaste Encyclopedia, we selected common agricultural biowaste to extract sugars from and quantify.
You can read more about the market segmentation analysis in our Proposed Implementation
To identify viable target markets for our engineered E. coli, we have researched and analysed sugar sources from various types of biomass, ranging from sugar cane bagasse to avocados to livestock manure. We have then integrated this information within our wet-lab research through sugar extraction and DNS assay.
For each biomass source, we compiled information and details that would assist us in determining the market opportunity of each source, including:
We were also conscious that we couldn’t find any resources that compiled together the market uses and sugar compositions of numerous biomass sources into a single document. By sharing our Biowaste Encyclopedia publicly, we envision it to serve as a guide for researchers looking for economic and sustainability opportunities within common bio-waste sources.
As part of testing processes for our engineered bacteria and simulating their implementation within the agricultural industry, we sought to extract the sugars from biomass sources and measure the growth of our engineered E. coli given these media. Utilising the results of our Biowaste Encyclopedia research, the final market opportunity rating given to each biomass allowed us to determine which biomass sources are most viable for our project and would lead to greatest marketable benefits upon potential implementation in the real world.
Specifically, we identified biomass sources with ratings of 4 or higher:
Through DNS assay, we identified wattles, bananas, bread (wheat), sifton bush and burret grail as biomass sources containing the highest sugar concentrations. This further narrowed the user characteristics that would make our project most viable.
Further information about the sugar extraction process can be found in the Engineering page
Overall, the Biowaste Encyclopedia helped us identify potential biomass sources, and direct our target industries in our future proposed implementation. This information fed into our wet-lab research through performing sugar extraction from these biomass sources and measuring the growth rate of our engineered E. coli.
Social values
The social values of the project reflect the desire for local people wishing to solve pertinent issues in the global community. Our team brings together high school students from 9 schools across the Sydney region, with a diverse range of backgrounds. Throughout the project, we aim to meaningfully and inclusively interact with our local community throughout the project within our process of Human Practices. As the first high school team from Australia to participate in iGEM, we also feel a strong responsibility to utilise our project as a vehicle through which we educate and inspire other young, local problem-solvers to engage in the growing sector of synthetic biology, and hence have developed educational material such as the How-To Guide for emerging highschool iGEM teams from Australia and guidance to promote future participation in iGEM.
Furthermore, after the competition, we hope that we have helped to educate the ‘next generation’ of synthetic biologists and leave a lasting legacy for young Australian science enthusiasts from our school and local community. We wish to communicate with other high school students about this growing field of science and to also encourage them to consider participating in iGEM in future years by providing guidance material and educational support tools for how to start an Australian team and be successful.
Moral values
We have consistently tried to carry out our project in an ethical manner from the stages of project ideation, creation and future implementations. We had a moral duty to ensure our E. coli strain was contained in lab conditions and not released before attaining social licensing. We have also decided as part of our project implementation that the Indigenous Australian communities in the local regions of the agricultural or bio waste processing facilities will be consulted prior to the implementation of the strain, and any sources of disruptions and leakages that may occur will be communicated to them as they are the traditional owners of the land on which this project has been constructed.
Environmental values
The environmental values of our project is heavily dependent on the minimisation of carbon footprints, and the reduction of the emission of toxic greenhouse gases that are contributing to the impacts of worldwide climate change. As a team, the processes that have been conducted throughout the year, have been sustainable and environmentally friendly processes. Being the first Australian high school team, we want to set an example for future high school teams and the secondary users of our genetically modified machine and promote the sustainable innovation of scientific and interdisciplinary studies within Australia.
Economic values
By unlocking the potential of biomass waste to make new products, we help to reduce landfill and create true circular economies by ensuring all waste from sectors such as farming and agriculture, is used in a sustainable way. Upon implementation, the efficient production of hydrogen from bacteria will have a wide-reaching impact across the local and global agricultural industry. In the near future, hydrogen will be a vital means of energy storage due to its lightweight nature and ease of transport relative to lithium-ion battery cells, and especially in regions where renewable energy production via solar and wind is impracticable.
Furthermore, in regions which may be severely impacted by impending climate change, providing accessible opportunities to use biowaste to create larger quantities of marketable hydrogen will help to keep smaller farms viable in the face of increased agricultural monopolisation. These factors fulfil many of our goals, especially regarding addressing local issues that affect local communities across different regions of the globe.
Prioritising Values
We value all the aforementioned aspects of the project. But the values that were often prioritised were economic and environmental aspects.
The economical aspects of our team were inspired by the facts that the current bioenergy resources are too expensive and slightly less efficient when compared to fossil fuels as shown by stats. This was combined with our environmental values to produce our pursuit for a ‘circular economy’ where waste is sustainably reused to induce profit.
The value that we ended up compromising on was the accessibility of the project. Currently, our project’s primary end users are other synthetic biology labs which wish to utilise our chassis organism, and hence our intended end users are separated from us by this additional step.
As synthetic biologists, one of our main responsibilities is to ensure that our work cannot be used in ways that negatively impact society, and as such, have posited potential malignant usage of our technology and how it can be mitigated. For example, people could start producing more waste in order to create bioenergy, which is really bad for the environment. By creating a solution to the problem of excess biowaste we have encouraged the production of extraneous waste products within the environment.
A few stakeholders include waste management companies, specifically those disposing of organic matter. Companies researching or producing cleaner energy methods would be interested in our project, as we offer an alternative to otherwise costly, inefficient methods of producing hydrogen. This is further explored in our Proposed Implementation.
Consultation
Social licensing would be required before implementation to gain the acceptance of relevant stakeholders and affected parties. We have identified that the people that will be consulted before the implementation of the project are the Traditional Owners (Indigenous Australians), Technical Advisory Committee, relevant government departments and agencies, and target consumers. We have also received feedback on the feasibility and desirability of our approach through communicating with Chartwells and a farmer, who are key stakeholders of our project.
Closing the loop
We have tried to “close the loop” between the design and what was desired. Through talking with Mr Heilman, we learned that the maximisation of profit from all parts of the produce has been desired by the agricultural industry over the past two decades. Through our interview with Chartwells, we also learned that food catering services are very invested in sustainable operations and waste minimisation. Furthermore, through our visit to Paddy’s Market, we were alerted to the fact that transportation of organic waste to farms or processing facilities leaves a significant carbon footprint, and an in-house solution is most ideal. Overall, through our market segmentation analysis, we sought to identify what each user class desired.
We responded to these desires by keeping the goal of a ‘sustainable economy’ at focus throughout our implementation design, where business operations can produce bio-energy from organic waste to ultimately yield profit. Through the construction and results from the Biowaste Encyclopedia, we matched farmers’ desires for profit maximisation with viable biomass sources, to reach a design which is most economically viable.
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