Environmental biotechnology uses organic and living systems to clean up waste, prevent pollution, and improve industrial processes. It focuses on remediation of old industrial pollution and profitable developments such as biomining, biofuel, and bioplastics production. Chemical engineering plays an increasingly important role. Research centers worldwide advance environmental science technology, producing waste-based raw materials, including biofuels from byproducts of paper and food production, and utilizing resources and land with no direct value in food production.
Environmental biotechnology is a field of science and engineering that uses organic and living systems to clean up environmental waste, prevent pollution through the development of green technologies, and improve industrial processes such as in the production of bioplastics and biofuels through enzymatic actions. The field of environmental science and technology is growing ever broader as industries look for more efficient and less polluting methods of production to comply with government regulations. One of the major areas that environmental biotechnology focuses on as of 2011 includes the remediation of old industrial pollution such as that of toxic metal contamination of soil or groundwater. Profitable commercial developments include biomining, biofuel and bioplastics production, and microbial treatment of wastewater streams.
Many modern nations have environmental biotechnology research centers that are both publicly and privately funded to advance environmental science technology. Examples of these include the Environmental Biotechnology Cooperative Research Center (EBCRC) in Australia which focuses on industrial pollution control and the Center for Environmental Biotechnology (CEB) in the United States which researches hydrological and microbial systems in relation to change issues climate change and environmental remediation through biological processes. While much of this research traditionally involves the biological sciences of microbiology and agricultural research, chemical engineering also plays an increasingly important role in the field. This is because many synthetic industrial compounds are known to be xenobiotic, accumulating in ecosystems and living organisms as they are not easily broken down by natural processes over time.
Among the most significant environmental technological solutions offered by research and development in environmental biotechnology is that of the production of waste-based raw materials. Raw materials are useless materials produced by an industrial process that can find added value in another process instead of being an environmental pollutant and a waste product both in terms of material and energy costs. The development of fuel systems has been most extensively researched for the production of fuel based on ethanol and through by-products created in the paper industry. Wood pulp and bark waste from paper production can be used to ferment biofuels, as well as materials such as waste vegetable oil (WVO) from commercial restaurant chains, green waste from municipalities and crop waste from sugar cane and beet production.
Other types of feedstocks include corn stew, a byproduct of waste corn that can be used to create ethanol, and soy soap, a byproduct of soybean oil production that can be used to create biodiesel fuel. Environmental biotechnology also seeks to utilize resources and land that have no direct value in food production. This involves growing plants that thrive on saltwater irrigation in coastal oceanic or desert regions where typical food crops cannot survive. Halophytes, including Salicornia bigelovii which is a species of dwarf glasswort, are examples of plants that produce biofuel crops comparable to those that can be obtained from soybeans and other oilseed-based grains.
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