Preventing the imbalance of the Earth is a cornerstone of vitroFAS. Unfortunately, the world is already in imbalance in so many ways. We want to correct that.
To get an overview of where we can help, we are using the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as our guideline. The SDGs are 17 interlinked objectives designed to develop various aspects of life on Earth and enhance the quality of life on Earth. These goals are geared towards increasing prosperity for life across the planet, by addressing key challenges like climate change, healthcare accessibility, responsible economic growth, and sustainable industrial practices, among many other efforts.
We believe that it is unattainable to focus on one goal without affecting another. Because of this, we want to keep all the SDGs in mind while focusing on the ones most related to our project.
Our mission is to rid the world of PFAS contamination by developing PFAS-degrading enzymes to use in a filtration system for safer drinking and wastewater. We can see our project’s ambitions and principles mirrored in Goal 3 “Good health and well-being," Goal 6 “Clean water and sanitation,” Goal 12 “Responsible consumption and production,” and Goal 14 “Life below water”.
Good Health and Well-Being
Because of their long half-lives, PFAS chemicals persist in the environment, accumulating in soil and water bodies. These chemicals are then engulfed by various organisms, causing them to move up the food chain and accumulate within the human body. Studies have linked PFOA to reduced fertility, complications in pregnancy, increased risk of certain cancers, weakened immune system, endometriosis, and numerous other harmful effects on humans1.
Our mission aligns with SDG 3.9:
3.9: “Substantially reduce the number of deaths and illnesses from hazardous chemicals and air, water, and soil pollution and contamination”
As PFAS has been linked to many hazardous effects, this target is of great motivation for our team! Our motivation for the project only increases as PFAS are linked to more diseases2.
Clean Water and Sanitation
Since the 1950s, humans have been polluting the world with PFAS. PFAS contaminates our water bodies and threatens our drinking water.
Our team aims to improve the quality of drinking water by effectively removing and degrading PFAS chemicals. This objective aligns with the 6th UN Sustainable Development goal, which is dedicated to assuring clean water and sanitation.
Specifically, Goals 6.1, 6.3, and 6.6 are relevant for our project. These targets focus on giving access to safe drinking water by reducing hazardous pollution in water, thereby improving the water quality for humans and ecosystems.
6.1: “Achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all”
6.3: “Improve water quality by reducing pollution, eliminating dumping, and minimizing release of hazardous chemicals and materials"
6.6: “Protect and restore water-related ecosystems, including mountains, forests, wetlands, rivers, aquifers, and lakes”
Our approach directly addresses these targets by removing PFAS from water sources. PFAS removal from the groundwater assures safe drinking water and cleaning of wastewater prevents PFAS from further polluting rivers, seas, and related ecosystems.
Responsible Consumption and Production
It is important to acknowledge that PFAS pollution is caused by humans, and it cannot be stopped by our team’s PFAS-cleaning technology alone. The outlet of PFAS must also be regulated properly.
We believe that if consumers are informed of the presence of PFAS in products, it would influence their buying habits, and therefore influence the market. Furthermore, we believe individuals would take a stand and push politicians and manufacturers to make a change. That is why we are focusing deeply on SDG number 12 as our most powerful tool for creating a sustainable relationship between consumers, manufacturers, and PFAS.
The UN SDG 12 strives to reach more sustainable consumption and production methods, we have dived into two of the targets:
12.4: “Achieve the environmentally sound management of chemicals and all wastes throughout their life cycle, in accordance with agreed international frameworks, and significantly reduce their release to air, water, and soil in order to minimize their adverse impacts on human health and the environment”
12.8: “Ensure that people everywhere have the relevant information and awareness for sustainable development and lifestyles in harmony with nature”
Our team contributes to goal 12.4 in two ways: firstly, we manage PFAS chemicals through their harmful life cycle by cleaning wastewater before it gets into the environment and informing about the PFAS issue to minimize production. Secondly, we minimize the amount of PFAS affecting human health and the environment by removing PFAS from drinking water before they are distributed from water facilities. Not only are we contributing with PFAS-destroying enzymes – but we are also affecting stakeholders by communicating the issue.
As target 12.8 states, information is key to sustainable development. We are raising awareness about PFAS and advocating for its regulation. We want people to be aware of their daily exposure to PFAS and ways for them to minimize it. To achieve this, we reached out to different stakeholders, such as regular students from various countries, the local community, and the Danish Minister of Environment, Magnus Heunicke. Read more in “Communicating with stakeholders and spreading the word”.
Life Below Water
Life below water is goal 14. The main objective is to ensure the health of oceans and seas by tackling hazardous pollution and waste in water bodies. By removing PFAS from our wastewater and other water sources, our team is ensuring the elimination of PFAS chemicals released into our ecosystems.
14.1: “Prevent and significantly reduce marine pollution of all kinds, in particular from land-based activities, including marine debris and nutrient pollution”
Our team strives to reach this goal specifically by eliminating the release of PFAS pollution into water bodies with our vitroZymes, thereby reducing marine pollution produced by human activities.
We put focus on PFAS leaking into the sea at our Beach Clean-Up event. Read more about the event later on.
Our Sustainable Solution
Every year about 850 thousand tons of PFAS are produced in Europe3. Currently, the disposing of PFAS-containing products consists of landfilling and incineration. Landfilling and spreading of PFAS-containing sludge onto fields are simply moving PFAS around, leading to pollution of the environment and groundwater, conflicting directly with SDG 3, 6, and 14.
The incineration method is destroying PFAS to prevent it from harming nature and humans. However, this method emits air pollution and only partially degrades PFAS4 to other PFAS types that cannot necessarily be measured 5,6,7. These methods contribute to PFAS being led out into nature and our drinking water again and again.
Fig. 1: When PFAS is filtered from drinking water, it will be sent to an incineration facility and broken down into smaller PFAS molecules. This will release PFAS back into nature and pollute the groundwater all over again – leading to PFAS-polluted drinking water and starting the cycle all over.
When waterworks filtrate PFAS from their water, the process they go through to get rid of it is incineration of the whole filter8. This means there is no sustainable solution for stopping the cycle of PFAS. Our vitroZymes will interrupt the cycle and provide a solution for waterworks that is more sustainable and can be incorporated on-site.
PFOA is one of the two most produced PFAS historically. Though PFOA is now banned in Europe, they remain in the PFAS cycle. They will be handled with our vitroZymes, preventing them from continuously harming the planet. Also, our modeling work has shown that the vitroZymes can possibly degrade other types of PFAS as well, making our impact greater.
Fig. 2: PFOA molecule marked with the cleaving sites of the vitroZymes.
The modeling performed has shown that the dehalogenases inherit domains from a family of enzymes, involved in cleaving the C-F bonds on the second carbon, as shown in Figure 2. This leaves a different PFAS molecule, for which others can develop degrading enzymes.
vitroZymes are the beginning and stepping stones for future work towards the complete degradation of PFOA.
This is an opportunity for future development, which is an advantage over the conventional methods of destroying PFAS, such as incineration. Incineration is a less controlled process, and the range of other PFAS by-product molecules created in the process is hard to predict, which is not the case with our synthetic biology approach7.
Communicating With Stakeholders and Spreading the Word
People's Meeting on Bornholm
Our first meeting with stakeholders like Magnus Heunicke, the Environmental Minister in Denmark, and employees at waterworks was at The People’s Meeting on Bornholm.
We asked Magnus Heunicke if he saw a potential in bacteria breaking down PFAS and he agreed. He saw a big potential in solutions that can break down PFAS and a big market for the ones who come first.
Educating international students
Because PFAS is a global problem, we wanted to educate both international and Danish students. We made educational material that taught students about the origin of PFAS and its hazardous effects. We informed them about the way PFAS gets from production into ecosystems and then accumulates in humans and wildlife. Teaching international students, we scattered the information to different countries like Mexico and Japan, so they also can make informed choices.
We saw that we had an impact on their knowledge about PFAS. We saw that in our questionnaire and on the post-its where the students wrote about PFAS and what they had learned.
Fig. 3: This shows the Nordfyns Højskole students’ perception of how often they are exposed to PFAS in their everyday life. They answered the questionnaire before and after our education session.
Beach clean-up day
Fig. 4: At our beach clean up event, we gathered a great team to save the beach from PFAS!
To put focus on life below water, we arranged a day for cleaning up the beach in Kerteminde (close to our hometown Odense). Since PFAS is in so many everyday products, trash in nature releases PFAS into the environment. In this specific event, we focused on life below water by getting people together to remove trash around the beach. Though the impact of cleaning the one beach is not huge, we shined a light on the problems we are facing in the oceans. An additional outcome was the formed connection between trash and the ocean other than plastic pollution in the participants - trash is also polluting the ocean by releasing chemicals like PFAS.
On this day the aim was to make the participants more aware of how PFAS products end up in nature and in general make them reflect on how responsible production could affect life below water. Additionally, it highlights the consequences of our current production and starts some thoughts about how to avoid all our products getting into the sea.
People's Climate Meeting
The greatest stakeholders of the SDGs are regular citizens. They are the ones who are affected the most, and in masses with the right information, they indeed have the power to move the world in a more sustainable direction. They will affect politicians and governments to make the big decisions that matter. Going to the People’s Climate Meeting, we talked with many different people of different ages and from different backgrounds.
We brought our PFAS-path game to engage people to learn about how PFAS find their way from everyday products to the environment (focusing on SDG 6 and 14) and humans (focusing on SDG 3).
The young school children had never heard of PFAS before, but when playing our other game: the PFAS board game, we made, they were surprised at how many products PFAS was found in. After hearing about the harmful effects of PFAS, they helped us destroy it in a PFAS-kubb game. Many of the grown-up citizens were already a little familiar with PFAS and wanted to do something about it but felt powerless. A lady came by our stand and asked what she could do about the PFAS issue, and many had the same question. We talked with them about buying products not containing PFAS, meaning that the next time they had to buy a new pan, they should choose a pan with no PFAS in it.
We also spoke with a citizen about the healthcare industry; in this field, avoiding PFAS would conflict with SDG 3 about promoting health and well-being. PFAS is an essential part of implants for it to be in the body for a long time without degrading. This made us aware of the aspects of responsible consumption and production:
Stopping the needless use of PFAS in production.
PFAS has properties that are important in medical appliances.
This conversation led to our talk with chemist Emil Damgaard-Møller, on the topic of PFAS alternatives.
Chemist: Emil Damgaard-Møller
Emil is a chemist from the Technological Institute, who guides companies about their use of PFAS and is also working with alternatives to PFAS. After discussing alternatives to PFAS, we were interested in whether our solution still would be relevant because some companies are already transitioning to replacing PFAS in their products due to new regulations. Emil argued that the PFAS pollution has been too extensive for too many years for alternatives to be the only solution. Our vitroZymes are still needed to bring balance back to the ecosystem and our drinking water.
To get more knowledge about how our project affects the real world, we visited and spoke to multiple waterworks. Read more about these conversations on our human practice page. We spoke to Vandcenter Syd, Tune Waterwork, Frederikshavn Waterwork, and Fanø Waterwork, which all agreed on the significance of getting rid of PFAS. They were very positive about our solution!
Vandcenter Syd is our local waterwork in Odense, which, amongst other goals, is working with Sustainable Development Goals 6, 12, and 14, overlapping with our goals9. We came to them with the idea of degrading PFAS from our drinking water, but in Odense PFAS pollution has not yet reached our drinking water - they find it in their wastewater. They measure high concentrations of PFAS in wastewater. This gave us the idea of implementing goal 14 into our project so that we not only protect humans but also life below water, from PFAS’ hazardous effects.
Lund collaboration
Our team wanted to raise awareness of the SDGs and how we address them. To achieve this, we collaborated with the iGEM team from Lund University, who have a project quite like ours. We are all working towards the goal of cleaning water contaminated with different toxic substances.
We contemplated how to effectively convey our message, and ultimately decided to launch an Instagram campaign focused on the SDGs. We discussed the content and the execution strategy in detail.
The campaign spanned over 5 days, starting with an introduction, and then presenting the four goals over the week. We provided information about each SDG and explained how each team was working to address it. This collaboration provided us with an opportunity to reach both Danish and Swedish citizens about the SDGs and the PFAS problem.
As already mentioned, the SDGs are interlinked and rebound effects can arise. We discovered that SDG 10 and 15 could be affected by our product.
Goal 10: "Reduce Inequality - Reduce inequality within and among countries"
Goal 15: “Life on land - Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss”
We aim to make drinking water healthier and stop the outlet of PFAS into nature through wastewater. However, our technology will only make drinking water more expensive for the consumer who gets water from waterworks implementing our solution, as it will always be cheaper to dump the PFAS waste. All waterworks do not need to implement our solution, so this will increase inequality in a country. Furthermore, our solution might not be affordable and therefore not prioritized by all countries, which increases inequality between countries. SDG 10 aims for less inequality within and among countries, and our solution could therefore affect this goal.
However, our solution also affects SDG 15 positively! That goal is about protecting life on land, and even though our focus has been protecting life below water (SDG 14), we are also impacting life on land, as all living beings depend on the water bodies our project is protecting.
Inspiration For Future iGEM Teams
The most important aspect missing in our project concerning SDG 3, 6, and 14, is the variety of PFAS that can be degraded with our enzymes. We have documented the methods of our experiments and computer modeling on the Experiments and Modeling page. We hope that future iGEM teams will work with other types of PFAS, providing an increasingly more sustainable solution for waterworks to implement.
Regarding SDG 12 about providing knowledge to the regular citizen, our PFAS path game and PFAS board game can inspire other iGEM teams to educate about the topic. The PFAS path game is relevant for the teams who want to educate people about the life cycle of products and the board game is relevant for those who will educate by testing the participant’s knowledge, and we hope to inspire other teams to create their own educational material as well.
Team
Fenton, S. E., Ducatman, A., Boobis, A., DeWitt, J. C., Lau, C., Ng, C., Smith, J. S., & Roberts, S. M. (2021). Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substance Toxicity and Human Health Review: Current State of Knowledge and Strategies for Informing Future Research. Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, 40(3), 606-630. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1002/etc.4890
ATSDR. PFAS - An Overview of the Science and Guidance for Clinicians on Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS). Agency For Toxic Substances and Disease Registery. https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/docs/clinical-guidance-12-20-2019.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1urivcEqHGwL3tGp043HfMi1llGJeJ_iuwUyLfM05pkYVNXE7AF3mcoVE
Emil Damgaard-Møller, Consultant at Institute of Technology, Personal Communication, August 31, 2023.
Stoiber, T., Evans, S., & Naidenko, O. V. (2020). Disposal of products and materials containing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS): A cyclical problem. Chemosphere, 260, 127659. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemosphere.2020.127659
Rikke Markfoged, Consultant at Institute of Technology, Personal Communication, August 16, 2023.
Meegoda, J. N., Bezerra de Souza, B., Casarini, M. M., & Kewalramani, J. A. (2022). A Review of PFAS Destruction Technologies. Int J Environ Res Public Health, 19(24). https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph192416397
Horst, J., McDonough, J. T., Ross, I., & Houtz, E. F. (2020). Understanding and Managing the Potential By‐Products of PFAS Destruction. Groundwater Monitoring & Remediation, 40.
Søren Duch-Hennings, Former Silhorko Employee, September 27, 2023.
