Growing Bioremediation Industry Presents A Potential Boom In Jobs For Life Scientists

With plenty of hazardous sites still to be cleaned up,analysts call biological disposal of wastes afield with a bright future Amid the doom and gloom of the job outlook for United States researchers, employment analysts are pointing to the environmental services market as one bright spot for candidates with scientific training. A recent U.S. News & World Report employment guide lists "environmental manager" as one of the top-20 "hot job tracks." According to the magazine, government and industry spent about $139 billion last year on complying with environmental regulations and cleaning up toxic waste sites (Oct. 31, 1994, page 110). Industry observers say that within this fast-growing business, life scientists--including biochemists and microbiologists-- would do well to seek out the small but rapidly expanding segment of bioremediation for employment. According to some estimates, market revenue in this field has at least doubled over the last five years. Type of Company Consulting/engineering Microbe and Remediation Producers Type of Professional Scientific (not R&D) 580 85 Project Management 340 32 Laboratory 150 39 Research and development 95 34 Total 1,165 190 Note: Seven microbe producers also provide consulting or remediation services; therefore, the number of employees counted twice is 80 scientific, 28 project management, 33 lab, and 29 R&D. Source: "U.S. Bioremediation Market, 1994-2000," DEVO Enterprises Inc. and The Jennings Group Inc., 1993 "The growth in the number of companies [offering bioremediation services] will--and does--translate into jobs," comments Kate Devine, president and founder of DEVO Enterprises Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based environmental consulting and publishing company. Bioremediation means using mi-crobes to clean up hazardous- waste sites, such as fuel spills, leaky storage tanks, and toxic soils and groundwater. One of the most familiar examples of bioremediation was the use of marine microbes in the 1989 cleanup of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. Although enlisting microbes to break down waste products is not a new industry--biological sewage treatment has been around for decades--using bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms to sanitize hazardous waste sites is a relatively recent technique in both research and business (A. Martello, The Scientist, Jan. 7, 1991, page 18). The expansion of the field, according to observers, is due in part to legislation and regulations requiring U.S. government agencies--such as the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Energy (DOE)--as well as private-sector groups like the petroleum industry to clean up their messes. "I think it's very promising," says Ronald Un-terman, vice president of re-search and de-velopment at Lawrenceville, N.J.-based Envirogen Inc., a six-year-old environmental biotechnology company, of the employment outlook for bioremediation. "There's a growing interest in the use of bioremediation in cleaning up our hazardous-waste problems. "When one looks at the technology of choice over the last 10 years at, say, Superfund sites, there's an increasing percentage [of companies and agencies] that are choosing biotreatment because it's the most cost-effective [method]. So in that respect the market is growing, and therefore the need for people to implement and develop the technology is [also] growing." The growth was facilitated in 1990, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approved bioremediation as a method to degrade toxic substances. Indeed, in 1994, EPA appropriated a $20.3 million budget for developing and demonstrating biotreatment systems for oil spills and other pollutants. But while industry executives and scientists report that their companies have plans to expand their scientific staffs in the next year, just how many new jobs the growth will create in the long run remains to be seen, analysts note. Dan Noble, vice president and director of research at Environmental Business International (EBI) Inc. in San Diego, an environmental publishing, research, and consulting organization, cautions that the positive development of the bioremediation industry needs to be viewed in the context of the entire environmental cleanup industry. "It depends on which end of the microscope you look through," he asserts. "If you're just looking at bioremediation itself, yeah, it's growing. [But] if you're looking at it taking over the remediation marketplace, that would be a false characterization." He points out that, despite the field's growth, bioremediation is only a "drop in the bucket" of the total $8.4 billion remediation market, which includes several other methods for treating contaminated sites. "If you look at remediation as a total market--according to the surveys we've run--about 10 percent of the sites are being bioremediated." "Just let me say: pits, ponds, and lagoons," states Peter Perez, president of International Biochemicals Group--a Baton Rouge, La., firm that produces sludge-eating microbes-- referring to what constitutes a bioremediation site. "For example, it could be a pond full of sludge laden with toxic substances that must be closed down. Or it could be an underground site where a chemical such as benzene has permeated through the ground and polluted an aquifer." Although definitions of bioremediation vary from company to company, most agree that there are four segments of this growing industry that involve scientists: and conduct the cleanup; biological analyses; and process. Envirogen's Unterman says support for bioremediation's recent upsurge is due in large part to the cleanup obligations of the federal government and heavy industry. In addition to DoD and DOE, he notes that Envirogen has many commercial clients, including those in the chemical, aeronautical, and transportation industries. "A lot of companies are cleaning up; they're under orders to," he adds. In the Valdez spill, EPA and other groups--including bioremediation companies--used nutrients and oxygen-containing compounds to stimulate the reproduction of naturally occurring marine microbes to consume hydrocarbons on oil-soaked beaches. While cleanup in the Valdez incident and on many other industrial sites today involves adding toxin-eating microbes to the site or enhancing natural microbe populations, another commonly used method entails treating contaminated soils or sludges in a device called a bioreactor. For example, TNT- laden soils at DoD sites are being decontaminated in bioreactors by TNT-consuming anaerobic bacteria, and transformed into nontoxic minerals at the end of the process. In September 1993, DEVO Enterprises and the Jennings Group Inc., a business research organization located in Columbia, N.J., published a report entitled "U.S. Bioremediation Market, 1994-2000"--a survey of about 130 companies. In 1993, the bioremediation market was estimated to have earned $150 million to $175 million from consulting/engineering and remediation services; $6 million to $7 million from microbe production; and $2 million to $4 million from bioreactor sales and applications, according to the DEVO and Jennings survey. Other analysts and estimations agree with these figures. The number of firms--of all types--entering the bioremediation market has been steadily increasing (see chart on page 8) in the last 10 years, the report found. In fact, only 15 percent of the companies surveyed in the DEVO and Jennings study offered bioremediation services before 1985. "In the early '80s, a few of us started playing with sites and [then] there was an exponential growth," recounts Perez, who started his company in his garage in 1981. According to the DEVO-Jennings study, many firms are relatively small: 39 of the 102 consulting/engineering and reme- diation firms surveyed reported fewer than 50 employees, with 90 percent of the microbe producers and 60 percent of the equipment manufacturers reporting the same. Nonetheless, most of the companies examined for this article do plan to expand their research and operations ranks this year. They say they will be hiring scientists with backgrounds in such areas as microbiology, biochemistry, chemistry, and engineering. For example, Envirogen, which employs 20 scientists and 30 engineers on its staff of 75, expects a 20 percent increase in employees, mostly in the area of operations--performing the actual cleanups. John Griffiths, president of Regenesis Bioremediation Products of San Juan Capistrano, Calif.--a newly formed company--is another executive who characterizes the opportunities for scientists as "excellent." Regenesis now employs three scientists on its staff of six. "We expect to be expanding significantly as we look ahead in the next few years because we're new," Griffiths predicts. "And if our plans materialize, we could be hiring roughly 20 people [with science backgrounds] over the next three years." Andrea Leeson, principal research scientist in the environmental restoration department at Batelle, a private consulting firm in Columbus, Ohio, points out that although her Ohio division hasn't been doing a lot of hiring, "certainly the people I went to school with haven't had any trouble finding jobs in environmental engineering," a primary discipline used in bioremediation. International Biochemical Group's Perez says the outlook is "great." He notes that this year, his 70-employee firm expects to add seven or eight bioremediation scientists to its Baton Rouge and Dublin, Ireland, offices. Allen Dines, president of BioRenewal Technologies, Inc. in Madison, Wis., a three-year-old environmental laboratory, reports that his firm employs four scientists on its staff of eight, and in 1995 he is hoping to add another five scientists and engineers. Bioremediation analysts point out that determining the number of scientists in the bioremediation industry is tricky because employees also work on nonbioremediation projects and the definition of who is considered a scientist--by job title-- varies among firms. But according to a portion of the DEVO and Jennings report--based on 74 consulting/engineering and remediation companies and 16 microbe producers surveyed--there are at least 1,200 people employed as bioremediation professionals (see table below). Noble, however, ex-pects that because bioremediation is still a small part of the environmental cleanup market, a substantial increase in jobs is unrealistic. It is on the order of hundreds, not thousands, by his calculations. "Certainly not an amount that will make experts in the field run to the colleges and say: 'Boy, we've really got to crank up our bioremediation programs,'" he contends. In fact, the EPA Office of Research and Development has funded a three-year study by three community colleges, entitled the "Bioremediation Curriculum Development and Training Project," to assess, among other goals, the education needs for bioremediation activities. The report states that "it is generally believed that the demand for skilled bioremediation [practitioners] will continue to increase as the market for bioremediation expands." Industry experts say it is essential that anyone in the environmental science field have a broad professional and educational background. Leeson, who has a B.S. in biology and a Ph.D. in environmental engineering, advises job-seekers: "It's pretty rare that you'll actually see an ad for someone who wants a bioremediation specialist. The consulting firms are really nervous about getting someone who's too specialized, because in these firms you end up having to do a little bit of everything." And, according to Griffiths, a prerequisite is training in three broad disciplines: chemistry, engineering, and microbiology. His advice to those interested in the bioremediation field is to "be open to learning" disciplines other than their degreed field. "That can come through field experience as well as taking additional courses at night. Then you'll be very valuable to the customer," he stresses. According to the DEVO-Jennings report, revenues from cleaning up underground storage tanks are predicted to peak at $375 million in both 1995 and 1996 and drop to $80 million in 2000, whereas the market for remediation of other types of sites is expected to increase steadily over the same five-year period (see figure above). And even though the numbers from the report seem to bear out some predictions that bioremediation is a finite market and that its growth will top out at the end of the century, most experts agree that there will not be a lack of waste to clean up for some time. Devine contends that some companies will employ bioremediation to prevent problems before they start by using, for example, microbes to launder industrial waste before dumping it into the environment.

Growing Bioremediation Industry Presents A Potential Boom In Jobs For Life Scientists

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