What is Environmental Biotechnology? A Venn diagram approach

Another post picking out what we hope are some interesting points from the recent paper on ‘What is Environmental Biotechnology?’. The motive is in part that it’s very long, and we don’t believe many people will persevere through the whole thing: one reader kindly but accurately compared the literature review in the first half to being struck gently but repeatedly over the head with a rolled-up towel.

But we do think the last part on definitions, and specifically on the use of Venn diagrams to explore them, is worth a look. So here are some examples of Venn diagrams from EBNet internal discussions:

(a) shows nested shapes with Environmental Biotechnology as a subdiscipline of environmental technology and both within environmental engineering; while this is a common view in the UK, in other places it is seen as the offspring of Chemical Engineering.

(b) is a snapshot from continuing debates on the role of synthetic biology in Environmental Biotechnology, within the context of national consultations on Engineering Biology and of concerns over unjustified exclusion or encroachment on other areas.  We suspect the Synthetic biologists might have a very different diagram!

(c) shows an overlapping interpretation, with some common areas, but no element fitting perfectly within another.  This one came up a lot in discussions of the relationships between biochar and biotech.

 In (d) Environmental Biotechnology understood as the intersection of several technology disciplines.

 In the last case, the range of technologies shown can be expanded to include others such as marine or medical and pharmaceutical biotechnology: but the presence of Environmental Biotechnology at the heart of this diagram reflects the central role of this discipline in ensuring circularity and sustainability in resource and energy use for the wider emerging bioeconomy.  We hope you enjoy them!

For a previous post on The Glamour Factor see here, and for our short ‘What is Environmental Biotechnology?‘ animation see here.  The paper is available here:

What is Environmental Biotechnology? Widely applied, but a clear definition of the term is still needed. Heaven, S., Kusch-Brandt, S., Byfield, L., Bywater, A., Coulon, F., Curtis, T., Gutierrez, T., Higson, A. and Sadhukhan, J., 2025. Environments 2025, 12(10), 393; https://doi.org/10.3390/environments12100393