Team:ITB Indonesia
Welcome to our Team WIKI!
Here we will post about our project and progress. In our latest project we will be making a halo-tolerant bacteria that can degrade PET plastic waste in the sea.
Plastic pollution, especially in the ocean, has always been a very concerning environmental issue, both globally and regionally. PET (polyethylene glycol)-based plastics polluting our ocean are very difficult to degrade (takes 450-1000 for a single plastic bottle to be naturally degraded). Moreover, harsh ocean environment (waves and sunlight) cuts these plastics into very small fragments called microplastics, which size is only several milimeters in diameter. These microplastics make plastic pollution even more hazardous and harder to deal with. Microplastics are commonly unintentionally consumed by marine organisms causing poisoning which leads to deaths. And while normal sized plastics are easy for humans to collect and recycle, in microplastic form, these plastics are impossible to collect, making them an untreatable pollution. This is a very dire issue, especially in our nation, Indonesia, where our government has made plastic pollution issues one of its main focuses. ITB Indonesia 2017 team will create a sythetic bacteria which have the abilty to degrade plastic pollution in the ocean efficiently.
This bacterial machine will do its action in 4 main steps:
detect the presence of plastic
attach and colonize around the microplastic
eliminate the microplastics
convert it to a nutrition source
