Aerobes and Effluents - Environmental Biotechnology: Theory and Application - page 141

Closing Remarks
In many respects, the treatment of effluents by biological means is of particular
importance to any consideration of environmental biotechnology, since it repre-
sents the central point of the previously mentioned intervention triangle, having
simultaneous relevance to manufacturing, waste management and pollution con-
trol. The majority of manufacturing companies produce wastewaters that contain
organic contaminants of one form of another and the traditional route previ-
ously in common use, discharge to sewer, watercourse or the sea, is becoming
less attractive due to environmental legislation and rising disposal costs. As a
result, for an increasing number of companies there is a growing requirement to
treat their own effluents and biotechnological processes can often prove the most
cost-effective means to achieve this goal.
References
European Commission's Directorate General for Environment (2001) Survey of
Wastes Spread on Land - Final Report , Office for Official Publications of the
European Communities, Luxembourg, pp. 2 and 55.
Hardman, D., McEldowney, S. and Waite, S. (1994) Pollution: Ecology and
Biotreatment , Longman, Essex, pp. 81-82.
Judd, S. (2006) The MBR Book; Principles and Applications of Membrane Biore-
actors in Water and Wastewater Treatment , Elsevier, Oxford, pp. 134-149.
CaseStudy6.1 'CSISeaside' (EnglandandWales)
Although around 97% of the beaches in England and Wales successfully met the
necessary European quality standards in 2008, a small proportion struggle with
persistent pollution problems, especially after incidents of heavy rainfall.
In an attempt to improve monitoring and ultimately reduce the incidence of
contamination, in 2009 the Environment Agency extended state-of-the-art forensic
DNA techniques to the large-scale analysis of bathing waters. In what is said to be
the first initiative of its kind in the world, the 'CSI Seaside' project - implemented at
a number of sites around the coastline - brings microbial source tracking (MST) to
the problem of identifying the origin of diffuse faecal matter in the water.
The basic principle behind MST involves screening laboratory-isolated DNA
preparations from water for the presence of particular Bacteroidetes species which
are naturally either only human-specific or animal-specific. Genotype determination
of Bacteroidetesin this way provides an unambiguous indicator of the original host
animal and thus makes it possible to determine the fundamental nature of the faecal
contamination, enabling sewage to be quickly discriminated from agricultural animal
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