Enzymes in Environmental Management
The quality of life on earth is inextricably linked to the overall quality of the environment. The increasing awareness of the environment we live in is bringing about a more intensive search for alternative cleaner technologies. Currently, there are two fundamental pollution-related problems: the disposal of the large quantities of wastes that are continually being produced, and the removal of toxic compounds that have been accumulating at dump sites in the soils and in water systems over the last few decades. Biotechnology is an essential tool to deal with this problem because it can provide new approaches for understanding, managing, preserving, and restoring the environment, transforming pollutants into benign substances, generating biodegradable materials from renewable sources, and developing environmentally safe manufacturing and disposal processes. This article is specifically devoted to the use of enzymes to help achieve these goals.
Application of Enzymes in Environmental Monitoring
Environmental monitoring involves the chemical analysis of defined pollutants. Despite the availability of advanced technologies for environmental monitoring, these methods have some inherent drawbacks. For example, only a few substances are monitored. Also, the pollutants can undergo further changes in their chemical structures. In such a case, monitoring of an indirect indicator can be advantageously used for environmental monitoring. For example, the induction of hepatic cytochromes in some mammals, e.g. wild rodents, can be used as a bioindicator for monitoring terrestrial environmental pollution.
Application of Enzymes in Waste Water Treatment
A large number of enzymes from various microbes have been reported to play crucial role in wastewater treatment applications. Enzymes can specifically act on and remove recalcitrant pollutants by precipitation and transformation to other products and can also change the characteristics of a given waste making it more susceptible to treatment or aid in converting waste material to value added products. Immobilization increases the mechanical and thermal stability of the enzymes while decreasing the probability of enzyme leaching into solution.
Application of Enzymes in Bioremediation of Solid Wastes and Soils
Solid organic wastes and contaminated soils present another challenge in POPs purification. Free enzymes mixed into the materials will only potentiate the problems on enzyme activities and stabilities observed in liquids. Enzymes applied to the soil will interact with its occurring particles of specific natures and this may change enzyme properties—for the better and for the worse. Heterogeneous structures of organic wastes and even more of different types of soils make it however unpredictable of what will happen to the free enzymes under authentic conditions. Fermentation with living enzyme-producing organisms is then a more practicable low cost alternative.
Enzymatic Treatment to Improve Waste Quality
Due to their high specificity to individual species or classes of compounds, enzymatic processes can be designed to specifically target selected compounds that are detrimental to the environment. Compounds that are candidates for this type of treatment are usually those that cannot be treated effectively or reliably using traditional techniques. Alternatively, enzymatic treatment can be used as a pretreatment step to remove one or more compounds that can interfere with subsequent downstream treatment processes. For example, if inhibitory or toxic compounds can be removed selectively, the bulk of the organic material could be treated biologically, thereby minimizing the cost of treatment.
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