The Role of Microbes in Bio Boom - Part 2.
Bio Boom is here!
This is a great challenge for countries like Finland (a lot of forests)
and Central Europe (a lot of cattle farms).
What is common to both of them?
After the production of ethanol (and some other beneficial compounds
like lignosulfonate) from sulphite pulp process, very few biotechnical
processes were applied to sulphate pulp processes.
Now it seems that ethanol can be an important product also in
forest industry.
And the cattle...?
Methane and hydrogen are important end-products of certain anaerobic
microbial processes. They were burned in previous times (I recall the
waste water treatment plant of Viikki, Helsinki, where no method to
collect these gases were available on 70's).
If we think the "end product of cows" we easily understand its value
in anaerobic gas production. Large farms in Central Europe are ready
to apply these techniques for the production of burnable gases.
Third, a most important aspect too, may be easily forgotten: aerobic
waste water treatment (activated sludge process) in Finnish pulp &
paper mills. It has improved significantly the quality of such big rivers
like Vuoksi and Kymijoki where large integrates of P&P industry
are situated.
- To be remembered: Bio Boom consists of many chemical and
technical innovations. These three issues, discussed above, are real
biotechnology. Biotechnology is a term for all processes which are
based on microbes (or on their metabolic products like enzymes),
not only on chemical reactions of non-living world. This means that
bioleaching of sulfide minerals is a real biotechnical process -
and makes it easier to understand the difficulties to carry it on.
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