Bruce Rittmann - On Environmental Biotechnology and Sustainability
Bruce Rittmann is Director of the Biodesign Institute's Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology, a Regents' Professor in Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering's School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, and a Distinguished Sustainability Scientist in the ASU Wrigley Institute. His interests lie in better understanding microorganisms so as to take advantage of the services they can provide to humans and our environment.
Transcript
I'm Bruce Rittmann, I'm the director of the Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology and the Biodesign Institute and I'm also a distinguished sustainability scholar in the Global Institute of Sustainability.
Explain your field of expertise.
What we do in environmental biotechnology is we work with microorganisms. Microbes can do many, many things. The reason they're so good at doing many things is because they're very small and simple. Unlike humans, who are very large and complicated, they can take advantage of almost any little bit of energy. They find the bad stuff to be their food. It's some part of their metabolism and therefore, how they get energy to live. And then they transform it, that's how they get energy to do this, and the transformed products then are harmless to us, or to the environment.
So the key thing here is to form a partnership with microorganisms and they'll provide us services, and we'll provide them a good life, and it's a good win-win situation. In our research, we try to understand the microorganisms: who they are, what they can do, and then what they need so that they'll be able to do the jobs that we want them to do. And everybody is very happy about it.
What is the real-work application of your research?
The first thing we use them for is to generate renewable energy and other valuable commodities. Some of our organisms take their energy directly from the sun, they're photosynthetic, and they produce a valuable product, so that we can feed into the energy system, or into the chemical system. We have other organisms that will take a biomass, organic material, and convert it into useful energy forms, such as methane, or hydrogen, or electrical power. Those are different organisms. That's a very, very big part of our research - finding organisms that will make these renewable resources for our use.
A second big area in our center is improving the quality of water, or soils that have been contaminated by various pollutants from industry, or other human activities. Here, we use microorganisms to transform these chemicals from something that's harmful into something that's completely innocuous.
The real world applications are mainly to improve sustainability either of our energy and material sectors, or in the sustainability of to some degree soil, but mainly our water sector by eliminating contaminants that are causing troubles either out in the environment for the natural ecosystems, or for humans, as we try to use the water for the various things we do in drinking, and agriculture, and manufacturing.
Describe one of your favorite research projects.
We do a lot of work with photosynthetic microorganisms and this is really important because they go right to the root of all renewable energy that comes to the planet. Virtually all renewable energy on the planet comes from the sun, so if we can produce fuel, or other chemical products directly from the sun, this is the most core way of generating renewable energy and materials.
It's really important also because we can do it, in principle, at a very large scale. We could generate enough fuel feedstock and chemical feedstock to basically replace all of our societies' use of fossil fuels. Now we can't do that today - that's way we're doing research and development - but in principle, there's nothing stopping us from doing it. It's a matter of technological and economic factors that have to be improved. But we could actually completely eliminate our dependence on all fossil fuels worldwide.
Why do you study sustainability?
It's a natural progression because if you look at it, what are we doing? We're regenerating renewable resources, or we're improving the quality of water, which is of course a renewable resource. Everything we do is a sort of naturally connected to the big issues of sustainability. So I didn't really have to make any special diversions, or detours. It's just what we do. What's happened, of course, is that the concept of sustainability has become so much more important now, so that what we do now has this much larger and really important umbrella under which we can work.
Explain your field of expertise.
What we do in environmental biotechnology is we work with microorganisms. Microbes can do many, many things. The reason they're so good at doing many things is because they're very small and simple. Unlike humans, who are very large and complicated, they can take advantage of almost any little bit of energy. They find the bad stuff to be their food. It's some part of their metabolism and therefore, how they get energy to live. And then they transform it, that's how they get energy to do this, and the transformed products then are harmless to us, or to the environment.
So the key thing here is to form a partnership with microorganisms and they'll provide us services, and we'll provide them a good life, and it's a good win-win situation. In our research, we try to understand the microorganisms: who they are, what they can do, and then what they need so that they'll be able to do the jobs that we want them to do. And everybody is very happy about it.
What is the real-work application of your research?
The first thing we use them for is to generate renewable energy and other valuable commodities. Some of our organisms take their energy directly from the sun, they're photosynthetic, and they produce a valuable product, so that we can feed into the energy system, or into the chemical system. We have other organisms that will take a biomass, organic material, and convert it into useful energy forms, such as methane, or hydrogen, or electrical power. Those are different organisms. That's a very, very big part of our research - finding organisms that will make these renewable resources for our use.
A second big area in our center is improving the quality of water, or soils that have been contaminated by various pollutants from industry, or other human activities. Here, we use microorganisms to transform these chemicals from something that's harmful into something that's completely innocuous.
The real world applications are mainly to improve sustainability either of our energy and material sectors, or in the sustainability of to some degree soil, but mainly our water sector by eliminating contaminants that are causing troubles either out in the environment for the natural ecosystems, or for humans, as we try to use the water for the various things we do in drinking, and agriculture, and manufacturing.
Describe one of your favorite research projects.
We do a lot of work with photosynthetic microorganisms and this is really important because they go right to the root of all renewable energy that comes to the planet. Virtually all renewable energy on the planet comes from the sun, so if we can produce fuel, or other chemical products directly from the sun, this is the most core way of generating renewable energy and materials.
It's really important also because we can do it, in principle, at a very large scale. We could generate enough fuel feedstock and chemical feedstock to basically replace all of our societies' use of fossil fuels. Now we can't do that today - that's way we're doing research and development - but in principle, there's nothing stopping us from doing it. It's a matter of technological and economic factors that have to be improved. But we could actually completely eliminate our dependence on all fossil fuels worldwide.
Why do you study sustainability?
It's a natural progression because if you look at it, what are we doing? We're regenerating renewable resources, or we're improving the quality of water, which is of course a renewable resource. Everything we do is a sort of naturally connected to the big issues of sustainability. So I didn't really have to make any special diversions, or detours. It's just what we do. What's happened, of course, is that the concept of sustainability has become so much more important now, so that what we do now has this much larger and really important umbrella under which we can work.