Industrial sustainability: an achievable goal

Human activities - industrialization, urbanization, agriculture, fishing, forestry and mineral extraction - profoundly affect the environment. To achieve industrial sustainability, resources need to be better managed, and wastes and pollution need to be reduced. Global environmental concerns help drive the use of biotechnology in industry not simply to remove pollutants but to prevent pollution at the source. Efforts to achieve clean industrial products and processes will bring great benefits to industry over the next ten to twenty years.

In today's world, it is increasingly clear that short-term, piecemeal solutions to dealing with environmental problems no longer suffice. In earlier decades, an emphasis on waste management suggested that our industrialized economies were waste-generating, and biotechnological options were almost totally used for waste treatment, end-of-pipe disposal, and remediation.

Attention must shift from disposing of pollutants to preventing their creation.
New industrial approaches are therefore needed, and the goal should be to eliminate pollution at the source: prevention rather than remediation. For industry, this means continuous innovation, improvement, and use of "clean" technologies to reduce pollution levels and consumption of resources. It is for this reason that greater attention is being focused on modern biotechnology, which can already, and will more and more, offer means of ensuring that production processes are clean.

Government policy, economic competitiveness and scientific and technological feasibility drive clean technology.
The three main drivers of clean technology are: government policy, which responds to public pressure and enforces or encourages changes in manufacturing processes to meet strategic, environmental or social needs; economic competitiveness (market pull), which leads companies to consider the advantages of clean products and processes in terms of market niches or cost advantage; and scientific and technological feasibility.

This means that all stages of a process must be designed to reduce environmental impacts.
Because all stages of a product's or process's life cycle may affect the environment, the design of industrial processes must take into account everything from choice and quantities of raw materials to reuse of waste. Environmentally friendly processes will consume less energy and raw materials and markedly reduce or even eliminate waste. The challenge to biotechnology is to provide tools that help achieve these goals and ensure greater industrial sustainability.

Industrial biotechnology provides routes to cleaner technology ...
It is in this context that industrial biotechnology, which uses microorganisms and biological catalysts (enzymes) to produce goods and services, has come of age. Microorganisms have been used to "manufacture" foodstuffs since prehistoric times, and industrial fermentation dates from the last century. Modern biotechnology builds on recent gains in our understanding of genetics and the relationships between biological structure and function. It makes use of recombinant DNA technology (otherwise known as genetic engineering) as well as of process technology, chemistry and classical engineering.

... and offers powerful and versatile applications.
Industrial biotechnology can play an important role because of its environmental advantages and its economic competitiveness in a growing number of industrial sectors. At an equivalent level of production, it can reduce materials and energy consumption, as well as pollution and waste.

As a source of clean technology, modern process biotechnology is slowly penetrating industrial operations.
An examination of how biotechnology is penetrating industrial operations reveals a pattern typical of the adoption of new technology: a slow initial phase of about a decade, followed by a period of rapid growth of about two decades, and finally a mature phase of slow growth. Today, biotechnology applications are used in many industries, some for over five years and others for as many as ten. In certain niches, industrial biotechnology affords clear economic and environmental benefits over existing technologies, and there are no major barriers to its continued success. The power of biotechnology continues to grow, and the capacity of biological systems for self-improvement ensures that it will play a very significant role in industrial sustainability.

Biotechnological innovation must be pursued vigorously through joint government-industry action ...
Because continued technical innovation is vital if biotechnology is to be more widely adopted by industry, joint government-industry action is needed to encourage the development and implementation of clean industrial products and processes. Government policies requiring cleaner industrial products and processes are often the single most decisive factor, while market forces can provide powerful incentives for seeking to achieve environmental cleanliness.

... to overcome obstacles to the use of biotechnology.
These actions are necessary because certain obstacles to the broader introduction of clean technologies remain: for example, end-of-pipe treatments may appear to be cheaper; regulatory authorities focus on the results of pollution rather than on its causes; the pay-back period for investment in clean technologies appears long; existing plant needs to be amortized; information is lacking; engineers are not trained in the biological sciences; and the cost-effectiveness of new technologies may not be established.