In May, the Japan Bioindustry Association (JBA; Tokyo), a nonprofit organization representing the biotechnology industry, asked the government to revise current bioremediation guidelines, which are being managed separately by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI; Tokyo) and the Environment Agency (Tokyo). Ebara (Tokyo), a manufacturer of industrial pumps, and Kyowa Hakko Kogyo (Tokyo), one of Japan's largest fermented-chemical producer, claim the two ministries are causing confusion by simultaneously releasing overlapping guidelines with different standards for evaluating the safety of such techniques. But the Environment Agency says its guidelines, which were released in March, focus on the potential effects of bioremediation on the environment, and covers studies on how microorganisms interact with different hydrological environments. The agency claims its guidelines "should not be considered as a double standard," because MITI's regulations on bioremediation cover the industrial application of biotechnology, and therefore do not provide detailed protocols on environmental safety. But JBA argues that the two guidelines should not have different criteria for safety evaluation, and calls for them to be merged in order to minimize costs and to avoid having bioremediation companies follow two different set of rules.
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