Meeting with the Experts

This week was one of my favorite weeks in 20.20 so far! The experts we talked to were so helpful in answering our questions, probably saving us hours and hours of research. Up until this week, I had the vague notion that our system in its current form would not work, but couldn’t really come up with a definite reason other than that it was kind of a mess. (Natalie described it as a dam with a bunch of leaks that we kept trying to plug with our fingers, which I thought was pretty accurate.) While our system now has a less well-defined goal than before the meetings, I believe we are moving in a better direction now. Such is the iterative design process! It is a little frustrating to be possibly taking a large step backwards at this point in the process, but if it will help our design, that’s what we’ll do.

One of the most important points brought up by the experts was the harmful effects of microplastics and plastic additives. Although we knew we would have to worry about the by-products of decomposition, this concern wasn’t as high on the priority list as figuring out how to make our system work in the first place. However, I had no idea of scale of the real problem: the spread of microplastics to nearly every corner of the globe, their tendency to accumulate in the digestive tracts of marine life, and the detrimental effects of plastic additives such as BPA (which can mimic estrogen and disrupt the endocrine system). We may narrow down to a more specific focus, which we knew from the beginning was a possibility—our goal was so ambitious! One interesting idea we are discussing is to engineer some bacteria to live in fish and chow down on the microplastics they eat. It sounds pretty cool and I think we should run with it, but who knows whether it will work. I’m excited to talk to Danny Ducat on Tuesday, and to see what direction our project heads next!