Agriculture helped give rise to civilization itself and for 2,000 years, the cultivation of crops has kept humankind alive and nourished. Improvements in technology and techniques have greatly increased crop yields, including the use of fertilizers. The widespread use of manufactured fertilizers in more recent history, however, has disturbed the environment, and the contamination of water supplies by these chemicals looms large as a direct threat to us and to other species.

Recently, EnviroZyme® achieved our ISO 9001:2015 certification following an intensive registration process and audit. This momentous achievement is a direct reflection of our relentless commitment to our customers in providing them with biological products and services of the highest possible quality, reliability, and safety.

Our last blog post examined water pollution as a result of specialization in industry, specifically in the food industry. For many of the same reasons that food production is concentrated into large, specialized factories, people tend to congregate in large cities. When people live closely together, they enjoy benefits such as near proximity to jobs, food, healthcare, and entertainment.

In modern food factories, foodstuffs are processed at staggering paces: 120 birds per minute at Tyson, 500,000 pizzas per day at Tombstone, 90,000 hogs per week at Smithfield. The undeniable efficiency of these companies and countless others is a direct result of specialization within the food industry; indeed, production processes have been increasingly concentrated into relatively small locations since the invention of canning and the subsequent proliferation of large-scale food production during the 19th century. By utilizing the same or similar raw materials to make large quantities of a single finished product, producers realize lower production costs per unit, and the consumer enjoys lower prices.

What Are Enzymes? Enzymes are large molecules, mostly proteins, that speed up chemical reactions. Scientists have determined that enzymes are able to catalyze, or speed up, over 5,000 specific chemical reactions. Appropriately, the substances on which enzymes act are called “substrates,” and the molecules produced as a result are called “products.” Which substrate an enzyme acts on is dependent upon the unique three-dimensional shape of each enzyme.