Team:HUBU-Wuhan/Human Practices

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Questionnaire Survey

    We designed a questionnaire to know about the opinion of people concerning our project and tell others some knowledge about iGEM.
    There are many students who majored in different subjects. So they are our first target. And of course, we asked the same questions to the professors, the teachers, and the other persons in the school yard.
    Chose two different times to send out this questionnaire. We got two pieces of the result.
    Part 1. (We did it in a large area in our university.)
    Part 2. (We gave it to the students who came into our major this year.)
    We made it together.

    First, the sex ratio distribution and the age distribution. (Fig.1 & Fig.2)We can see the male to female ratio is almost 1:1 and the reading college students account for the vast majority.

    Than we asked some questions about iGEM, and many of them known about it from our introduction. Such as little speeches and the network media.(Fig.3)

    After that, we got some answers about if they know what we want to do and what is the meaning of our subject. Our team was built up only several months ago. So introducing our team and the iGEM is one of the duties we have. The another significant thing in this questionnaire is to show how much do people know about the new energy and the converted of waste into energy.
    About the many kinds of energy we use, people always know about one or two.(Fig.4) From the chart, it is obviously that 97.32% person use the gasoline or know it. It means almost transportation around us always use the gasoline to be the power.

    And in our project, we change the wasted cartons into the isobutanol to be the energy which can be used on the plane or other transportation.
    From the result, we can see lots of people know about that the ethanol with the isobutanol can be used as the power.(Fig.5)

    Now in our country, the government made a policy about adding ethanol to gasoline for decreasing the air pollution. More and more transportation begin to use this mixed fuel. However this policy is not carried out with a large strength up till now. But what surprised us is that there are still some people have known about it and they are really supporting to this policy.(Fig.6 & Fig.7)

    At last, the question we want to know is that people support our subject or not. It is truly important to us. So we also asked about the attitude with our project. The good news is that there are 98.08% person gave us their sustaining.

Conclusion of the Survey

    After we finished all of the questionnaire, we find out that the speech we had done, the poster we had made and of course the questionnaire it self are really significant to the whole subject we have. We want that more and more people can know about iGEM and our team HUBU-Wuhan. Than they can think a lot, such as how to protect our environment or how to change the worst we had done. Through the survey, we also caught people want to have a better homeland. So we want to show what we did and do a lot to figure out more things we can improve like the new mix energy isobutanol.

Study Tour
in Scientific Institutes

    To obtain better understanding of synthetic biology and our iGEM project, we also performed study tours to advanced scientific institutes. On Sept. 7, 2018, we visited the Wuhan Institute of Biotechnology (WHBIO). WHBIO is one of the world-class biological research institute, which aims to build close academia-industry cooperation on the discovery and development of innovative solutions to address major environmental and health concerns.

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    During this study tour, Mr. Bin Yang, the director of the technology facility center of the WHBIO, introduced the synthetic biotechnology platform to us, including the most advanced automated instruments and how synthetic biotechnology could be used in industry and medicine. As an example, Mr. Yang shared the projects that the synthetic biotechnology platform helped Wuhan Yuzhi Biotechnology Co., Ltd. to successfully produce products such as lignocellulosic biofuels, fatty alcohol, paclitaxel, polyhydroxy fatty acid, and lycopene, which are widely used in the fields of daily necessities, medical materials, and biofuels etc.

    At the same time, we also discussed our iGEM project with Mr. Yang. It is encouraging that the aim of our project of bio-recycling waste paper boxes to produce renewable biofuels of isobutanol and bioethanol is well aligned with the mission of the WHBIO, demonstrating the significance and positive impact of our project to the environment and human daily lives.

Integrated Human Practice

    Due to the fast expansion of online retail business, excessive paper delivery boxes now cause a social and environmental problem. For example, the Double 11 & Singles' Day Global Shopping Festival in China could generate more than 165 million paper packages in one week. In 2017, more than 40 billion express packages were delivered in China, with half of them were paper cartons. It was noticed that China has contributed more than half of the world's express delivery growth, and is ranked as the first in the world in the paper carton usage for the last four years.

    In China, courier operators can operate on different scales, ranging from specific towns to regional, transnational, and even global services. All the major global express delivery companies, including DHL International Express, UPS Express, FedEx, and TNT Express, operate business in China. At the same time, China oriented express delivery agencies companies, such as Zhongtong Express, Shunfeng Express, Yuantong Express, Baishi Express, etc., are mainly operating the express delivery business inside China. As a developing country, recylcling system of paper cartons in China is still inperfect. It’s easy to find different types of paper boxes by the trash can, on the roadside in the campus, or in the express stations. In this human practice, we investigated the ZhonTong and ShunFeng express stations in the campus of the Hubei University to further understand the problems raised by excessive paper cartons.

“Zhong Tong” express station （A）， “Shun Feng” express station （B）

1: How many packages do you receive each day?

    In normal times, “Zhongtong Express” probably receives about 1,300 packages every day. During the holiday seasons and shooping festival such as the “Double 11 shopping festival”, more than 2,000 packages will be delivered in a single day. To the same question, “Shentong Express” said that probably more than 800 packages were delived every day. Since there are 7 different express stations in the campus, it could be estimated that more than 7,000 packages were delivered in the campus each day, and halo of them are paper cartons.

2: How do students handle the cartons after receiving the packages?

    A small portion of students open the packages immediately by the express station and return the paper cartons. Most students took the packages back to the dormitory, and the paper cartons were mostly treated as normal trash.

3: How do you deal with the cartons that students unpack on the spot?

    We collect those courier boxes together. The cartons reaching the re-using requirements will be reused, and the damaged cartons will be sent to the Waste Recycling Station.

    Based on our investigation, the frequency of paper carton recycling is low in campus, and the discarded cartons around the campus do cause environmental problem. It is no doubt that converting the paper cartons into fermentable sugar to produce renewable biofuels will provide an alternative strategy to solve this practical problem.