Industrial and environmental biotechnology is a broad category of technologies that employ enzymes and microbes in a wide range of industrial and pollution control processes. Industrial biotechnology products and processes are likely to become as ubiquitous as those of the chemical industry today. Some analysts compare the current status of biotechnology to that of chemistry in the 1870s when it had a limited range of applications (e.g. dyes). Today, industrial chemistry is found in the food processing, pharmaceutical, fuel production, textile, fertilizer, water and paper
industries, among others. Industrial biotechnology is likely to develop the same way (The Economist, 2003).
