Team:WLC-Milwaukee/HP/Silver
Ethics and Impacts
As a team, we feel it is vital that we educate ourselves and others about the context, ethics, and safety of our work. As a result, we endeavored to examine some of these issues both before, and during, our work on this year’s project.
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Ethical Considerations
Water is an immensely powerful natural resource both physically and societally, making it a heavily contested subject both ethically and legally. Over 1 billion people in the world live without consistent access to clean water, over 2.6 billion people live without access to basic sanitation, and many areas of the world are utilizing the water supplies they do have at unsustainable rates (for example the American Southwest, and California). But water is more than just a resource for consumption or to be used in irrigation; it serves as the basis of the web of life on our planet, and carries heavy symbolism and meaning in nearly every culture or religion. These needs, beliefs, and environmental factors are all dynamics that should be considered when creating a product designed for use in water management. One of the most significant recurring themes we encountered in various cultural beliefs and needs was the importance of reducing plastic and environmental pollution. What is the point of creating a system to evaluate water pollution, when the test itself pollutes the very environment it was designed to help protect? In our own work, we endeavored to create a product that was sustainable, safe, and respectful of the beliefs and needs in various target communities. We purposefully considered how we could reduce the possible waste byproducts of our test kit by reducing the number of components and researching environmentally friendly kit components, or kit components that are easily recycled and non-toxic such as glass substrate shipping vials, biodegradable filter papers, and recyclable syringes. Additionally, all biological components of the kit are non-infective and quickly degrade in the natural environment, further reducing the potential negative impacts of our system on bodies of water. While there are certainly other considerations that must be analyzed, we believe our kit design ethically and sustainably fulfills a need for faster, easier fecal coliform testing.
Some Human Practices topic areas
- Philosophy
- Public Engagement / Dialogue
- Education
- Product Design
- Scale-Up and Deployment Issues
- Environmental Impact
- Ethics
- Safety
- Security
- Public Policy
- Law and Regulation
- Risk Assessment
What should we write about on this page?
On this page, you should write about the Human Practices topics you considered in your project, and document any special activities you did (such as visiting experts, talking to lawmakers, or doing public engagement). This should include all of the work done for the Silver Medal Criterion #3. Details for your Gold medal work and/or work for the two Human Practices special prizes should be put on those specified pages.
