Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
In addition, the development of effective biosensors, powerful tools which rely on
biochemical reactions to detect specific substances, has brought benefits to a wide
range of sectors, including the manufacturing, engineering, chemical, water, food
and beverage industries. With their ability to detect even small amounts of their
particular target chemicals, quickly, easily and accurately, they have been enthu-
siastically adopted for a variety of process monitoring applications, particularly
in respect of pollution assessment and control.
Contaminated land is a growing concern for the construction industry, as it
seeks to balance the need for more houses and offices with wider social and
environmental goals. The re-use of former industrial sites, many of which occupy
prime locations, may typically have associated planning conditions attached
which demand that the land be cleaned-up as part of the development process.
With urban regeneration and the reclamation of 'brown-field' sites increasingly
favoured in many countries over the use of virgin land, remediation has come
to play a significant role and the industry has an on-going interest in identifying
cost-effective methods of achieving it. Historically, much of this has involved
simply digging up the contaminated soil and removing it to landfill elsewhere.
Bioremediation technologies provide a competitive and sustainable alternative
and in many cases, the lower disturbance allows the overall scheme to make
faster progress.
As the previous brief examples show, the range of those which may bene-
fit from the application of biotechnology is lengthy and includes the chemical,
pharmaceutical, water, waste management and leisure industries, as well as man-
ufacturing, the military, energy generation, agriculture and horticulture. Clearly,
then, this may have relevance to the viability of these ventures and, as was
mentioned at the outset, biotechnology is an essentially commercial activity.
Environmental biotechnology must compete in a world governed by the Best
Practicable Environmental Option (BPEO) and the Best Available Techniques
Not Entailing Excessive Cost (BATNEEC). Consequently, the economic aspect
will always have a large influence on the uptake of all initiatives in environmen-
tal biotechnology and, most particularly, in the selection of methods to be used
in any given situation. It is impossible to divorce this context from the decision-
making process. By the same token, the sector itself has its own implications for
the wider economy.
The Global Environmental Market
The global environmental market is undergoing a period of massive growth. In
2001, the UK's Department of Trade and Industry estimated its value at around
1500 billion US dollars, of which some 15-20% was biotech-based. Although
the passage of time has now shown some of the growth forecasts then made for
the following years to have been somewhat optimistic, a recent study predicts
that the market will have grown to 7400 billion US dollars by 2025 (Helmut
Kaiser Consultancy, 2009). There are several major factors acting as drivers for
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