Team Salty Microbial Helix is Forced to Change Names

This was a fun week in 20.020! I had a good time coming up with our three ideas and I’m excited to see where our project (plastic decomposition) goes next. We also need a new team name now that our project has nothing to do with salt, microbes, or helices... suggestions?

I learned to be concerned about the environment from my mom, an environmental engineer, so I'm glad we picked a topic that will help the planet. I was always the one turning off all the lights in our house and making sure to recycle and compost as much as we possibly could. Although a complete solution to the plastic problem is probably a pipe dream at this point, it is so cool to imagine that I could design something with such a big impact on the world… sigh.

Scientists have developed thousands of different kinds of plastics, so figuring out how to take them into account is the first puzzle that I’m trying to wrap my head around. Right now we are envisioning an immune-system-like approach that can respond to different types of plastic the system encounters, similarly to how the body’s immune system can ward off foreign antigens. This is really cool to think about even if it is pretty crazy. I think we’re going to have a hard time making it work for every kind of plastic on the planet, so we have to prioritize. Should we focus on the most harmful plastics? The most numerous ones? The ones that can’t be recycled? All things to think about. If building a plastic decomposition system that can attack multiple variants of plastic proves too challenging, our fallback plan is to focus on Styrofoam. It’s a big problem and I think it’ll have to be narrowed down at least a little bit before we can really tackle it, but I’m excited to start designing!