Our favorite SDG is #12: RESPONSIBLE CONSUMPTION AND PRODUCTION.
Space travel is often decried as wasting resources that are desperately needed on Earth's surface. However, without space travel, we cannot sustain high-tech life on Earth, and thus space travel is essential. However, when we travel in space, we ought to recycle as much as possible. Every gram of plastic that we recycle saves on launch fuel.
Space missions create a lot of trash, but astronauts can’t just throw it away like we do on Earth. Right now, places like the International Space Station have solutions that are insufficient and polluting. Waste is packed into cargo spacecraft and pushed into Earth’s atmosphere, where it burns up instead of being recycled. Each astronaut creates about 2.5 kg of trash every day, so the waste quickly piles up. This is a big problem because: Space inside spacecraft is very limited. Sending supplies or removing trash costs a huge amount of money. Future missions to the Moon and Mars will last much longer, so waste will keep building up. We noticed that Astronauts use many PET plastic like bottles and packaging which leads to thinking of a solution to this Therefore, we came up with a solution! Essentially, we are doing a biological approach to PET plastic recycling by engineering bacteria that release genetically modified plastic-degrading enzymes. With this in mind, our goal is to reduce PET waste by recycling in an efficient and sustainable way, along with providing cheaper solutions for space companies.
Although this project is optimized for use in space, the scientific discoveries involved have the potential to be applied on earth. PET recycling on earth can use a wide range of chemical processes: our biochemical process offers relatively low temperature as a key feature, but high-temperature processes are easier to handle on earth than they are in space. Thus we are not likely to mass-produce the systems that are useful in space for the exact same use on earth because older systems are more efficient for the earth use-case. However, the scientific innovations from our project, such as our new composite part, are likely to be useful on earth.