Contaminated Land and Bio-Remediation - Environmental Biotechnology: Theory and Application - page 97

Figure5.2 Technologyclassification
intensive or extensive regimes of processing. In many respects, such a 'pick-and-
mix' attitude makes the whole approach to cleaning up land far more flexible. The
enhanced ability this confers for individually responsive interventions stands as
one of the key factors in its wider potential uptake. In this way, for example fast
response applications can be targeted to bring about a swift initial remediation
impact where appropriate, switching over to less engineered or resource-hungry
technologies for the long-haul to achieve full and final treatment.
As has been mentioned several times before, commercial applicability lies at
the centre of biotechnology, and process integration has clear economic implica-
tions beyond its ability simply to increase the range of achievable remediation.
One of the most significant of these is that complex contamination scenarios
can be treated more cheaply, by the integrated combination of lower cost tech-
niques. This opens up the way for higher cost individual methods to be used
only where absolutely necessary, for example in the case of major contamination