Biotechnology and Waste - Environmental Biotechnology: Theory and Application - page 173

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Biotechnology and Waste
As mentioned in Chapter 1, waste represents one of the three key intervention
points for the potential use of environmental biotechnology. Moreover, in many
ways this particular area of application epitomises much of the whole field, since
the management of waste is fundamentally unglamorous, typically funded on a
distinctly limited budget and has traditionally been viewed as a necessary incon-
venience. However, as the price of customary disposal or treatment options has
risen, and ever more stringent legislation been imposed, alternative technolo-
gies have become increasingly attractive in the light of their greater relative cost
effectiveness. Nowhere has this shift of emphasis been more apparent than in the
sphere of biological waste treatment.
With all of environmental biotechnology it is a self-evident truism that what-
ever is to be treated must be susceptible to biological action and hence the
word 'biowaste' has been coined to distinguish the generic forms of organic-
origin refuse which meet this criterion, from waste in the wider sense, which
does not. This approach also removes much of the confusion which has, histori-
cally, dogged the issue, since the material has been variously labelled putrescible,
green, yard, food or even just organic waste, at certain times and by differing
authors, over the years. By accepting the single term biowaste to cover all such
refuse, the difficulties produced by regionally, or nationally, accepted criteria for
waste categorisation are largely obviated and the material can be viewed purely
in terms of its ease of biodegradability. Hence a more process-based perspective
emerges, which is often of considerably greater relevance to the practical con-
cerns of actually utilising biotechnology than a straight-forward consideration of
the particular origins of the waste itself.
TheNatureofBiowaste
Biowaste arises from a number of human activities, including agriculture, hor-
ticulture and industry, broadly falling into one of the following three major
categories: faeces/manures, raw plant matter or process waste. This fits neatly
into the process-orientated approach mentioned above, since the general char-
acteristics of each are such that biological breakdown proceeds in essentially
the same manner within the group and, thus, the ease of their decomposition