Team:Oxford/P&P realisationandsafety

Realisation
Our engineers have used CAD CAM and 3D printing to produce a prototype model of how our environmental solution could be devlivered in a practical, cheap, and user friendly way.
The material used for 3D printing is relatively inexpensive, especially given how little of it is needed to produce each biosensor or DCMation unit.

For more information, take a look at our Biosensor Realisation and Bioremediation Realisation and Biopolymer Containment pages...

Cost

One of the points raised by the Environment Agency was the huge cost of simply testing for chlorinated solvent pollution, before even beginning to deal with any which is found.
The current method requires using a national network of thousands of boreholes, which are regularly sampled for numerous contaminants, including DCM and other chlorinated solvents. Initial tests give an indication of the presence of contaminants, and further tests are conducted if necessary. Tests include HPLC and mass spectroscopy. These techniques are highly expensive, costing the government hundreds of pounds per sample.

Here in the UK we are extremely fortunate to have an Agency which performs these tasks, at great expense, to protect us and our environment from chlorinated solvent waste. However, there are many places in the world where testing and decontamination procedures are far less rigorous.

We hope that development of a biosensor and bioremediation kit which is cheap and easy to manufacture would contribute to improving conditions and drinking water quality in countries which are currently unable to test for and subsequently deal with chlorinated solvent pollution due to the prohibitive cost of the processes involved.
We also hope that the ideas we develop can ultimately be applied to tackle other pollutants, using the biosensor-bioremediation-biopolymer containment mechanism technology developed by Oxford iGEM.
We hope that...

Safety

For more information take a look at our Safety page...

References

References here...