Technology of Biosurfactants for the Development of Environmental Remediation Processes

Abstract

Copyright: © 2012 Colin VL. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The world is now confronted with serious problems of environmental contamination, which demand immediate solutions. The extensive production and use of hydrocarbons has resulted in widespread environmental contamination by these chemicals, which due to their toxicity on living organisms, are considered as proprietary pollutants. On the other hand, industrial and mining activities are important for economic development. However, these activities represent the main sources of heavy metal contamination, which provide unique challenges for their remediation, as they cannot be degraded into innocuous products. Although a variety of remediation technologies that include, mostly physicochemical methods, are available to address contamination with hydrocarbon and heavy metal, these processes have several disadvantages including the high cost and the risk of secondary environmental pollution. The situation is more critical in developing countries where there is no legislation to respect. As a result, it remains important to develop new techniques for reduction of these pollutants to acceptable levels, but at more manageable costs.