Environmental Remediation? Microbes to The Rescue!

While it’s often said that “any publicity is good publicity”, that doesn’t hold true when it comes to media reporting about microbes. These little guys typically get bad press in the media. However, while there are a variety of pathogenic microbes that can cause disease in human, animal and plant hosts, not all microbes are created equal – many are actually beneficial and useful to society and the environment. For example, there are useful microbes that include bacteria that live in symbiosis in the human gut that prevent colonization from pathogenic bacteria, as well as microbes employed in the biotechnology industry to produce insulin and food preservatives. Among the top contenders of useful and beneficial microbes are what are known as “environmentalist bacteria”, such as those used for oil spill cleanup in Alberta and other areas.
Bioremediation
Bioremediation is an environmentally-friendly way of using microbes to break down pollutants for applications such as soil remediation in Alberta. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are pollutants that can cause global health issues and environmental damage due to their mutagenic and toxic properties, and cause contamination of soil, air and aquatic environments. PAHs can be devastating to the environment and marine life, and to add to the environmental disruption, chemical dispersants are often used to break up oil in oil spills into manageable amounts for bioremediation. Using microbes for hydrocarbon remediation in Alberta eliminates the need for contributing more chemicals to the environment.
The Bioremediation Process
There are multiple environmental factors involved with the microbial degradation of PAHs during remediation in Edmonton, such as the nature of the pollutants, microbes used, oxygen availability and available nutrients. Incorporating oxygen into hydrocarbons allows the microbes to funnel carbon effectively into metabolic pathways increases their metabolic activity. During remediation in Saskatchewan that involves high salt water concentrations; halophilic bacteria are used to treat polluted seawater occurring from seawater oil spills. Oil-degrading bacteria produce bio surfactants and bio emulsifiers that reduce surface tension, dispersing hydrocarbons into smaller particles that microbes can then process.
Bioremediation: Environmental Green Cleaning, Naturally
While the media often associates bacteria with disease, bioremediation is a good example of how microbes can benefit humans, animals, plants and the environment by physically cleaning up after human errors. Other toxic pollutants and oil spill clean-up methods such as using boomers to scoop up oil, applying chemical dispersants or burning can cause even more environmental stress than the initial polluting event. Alternatively, bioremediation is an environmentally “green”, highly efficient cleanup method, as the bacteria employed aren’t known to cause harm to the marine habitat.
Despite prior remediation methods and attempts, many effects of previous oil spills are still evident today. For example, dolphins native to regions involved in spills continue to die more frequently, and many bird-nesting islands have been lost, due to the continued effects of oil poisoning. Barrier islands continue to deal with washed up oil previously buried under offshore sand. However, without the use of environmentally-friendly microbes and bioremediation, the consequences of oil spills may have been, and continue to be a lot worse – and we can thank bioremediation microbes for that.