Design
Process
All people want to see beauty on Earth. Unfortunately, we humans have disrupted nature’s beauty and balance with our pollution. Ocean pollution winds up on beautiful islands and coastlines, killing sea life so we wanted to put an end to manmade trash pollution in the ocean.
We thought a lot about the perfect machine but we went through many changes to get to something that we think will truly work.
Our first design was modeled after the WasteShark. At first, we wanted our robot to go out to sea to collect trash and bring it back to shore. We decided after more research to create something that cleans the rivers instead.
We found out that 10 of the most polluted rivers in the world contribute to 90% of the trash in the ocean. We realized there would not be an easy way to consume a large volume of plastic and trash pollution from the oceans, so this idea just did not work. We decided to improve the WasteShark device by adding a solution to consume the plastic while it was being collected.
Our second design involved nets to catch smaller plastics and breakdown buckets where the enzymes would be, but the drawback is it would result in capturing fish and debris as well.
Also, there was no space on this device to sort and move the amount of plastic we want to collect. We decided we would need some sort of conveyor belt at this point.
We thought about the least polluting way plastic can be broken down. We were excited to learn there were two different solutions; PETase, MHETase, and fungi found in the Amazon. We decided to choose the enzymes because we could not find much information about the fungi or how to make them work faster. We thought creating enzymes using advanced technology would be a new cutting edge way to solve this plastic problem. The more we learned about enzymes, the more we discovered how they can be intelligently mutated to perform in various ways.
We decided to splice our enzyme with the fastest performing enzyme using supercomputer technologies of the future to make it faster at digesting plastic. Keeping enzymes in a moving chamber would agitate them and the constant friction would create more heat, which would improve their efficacy. This is how we came up with the fidget-spinner design for the enzyme chamber for our concluded BioBot - we needed a solution that kept consuming the plastic as it was collected and kept the enzymes doing what we needed from them.
Finally, we took the Interceptor design and combined it with our SuperEnzyme, trying to sketch different variations that would allow us to efficiently collect the trash and allow the enzyme to do its job. This is when we studied many devices and finally picked the Interceptor for how efficiently it collected and sorted trash. This is also how we designed our new enzyme chamber to house the BioBot.
We knew we still needed an agitation chamber idea. We realized we had to figure out what the by-product would be because Plaxx is also a byproduct of plastic breakdown and could be dangerous for the environment should it be let into the ocean. We struggled with this because it didn’t make sense to us to break down plastic into building blocks of plastic, transfer it to shore using fuel, transport it to a factory using more fuel and resources, only to make more plastic. We needed a better way.
We came up with a brilliant idea! We learned all organic matter can be broken down into carbon and that by changing the arrangement of the atoms, we can make the by-product a carbohydrate. By creating a carbohydrate from the plastic waste, we could restore the ocean to a thriving ecosystem by feeding all the lower levels of the ecosystem, and that in turn would help all the higher levels.
So this was our solution to the biggest problem of all: what can a SuperEnzyme break plastic into that benefit the ocean’s ecosystem or ours?
BioBot design sketch
BioBot combines the design of the Interceptor with plastic-eating super enzymes
