This calculation does not take into account the benefits of decreased environmental pollution, the recycling of nutrients, the decrease in the need for landfills and the significant reduction in human diseases. Diverse soil biota facilitate soil formation and improve it for crop production. Overall biological methods are more effective than physical, chemical, and thermal methods, because the latter methods often simply transfer the pollutant to a different medium instead of converting it to a less toxic substrate, as biological methods often do. The ability of bioremediation to provide continuous cleanup of contaminated sites, such as agricultural ecosystems with toxic pesticide residues, is a significant advantage of this method. Furthermore, a significant degree of self-regulation is present in such biological systems because the added microbes survive by consuming and degrading chemicals but die when the nutrient source, that is the pollutant, is reduced or eliminated.
Bioremediation is effective in cleaning up highly polluted soils.
The presence of large numbers of microorganismal species expands both the variety of and extent to which chemical pollution in the environment can be degraded. Nearly half of the current economic benefits of biotechnology relate to agriculture, with significant benefits in the pharmaceutical industry. However, the value of these natural enemies to pest control is often overlooked. A world value for foods harvested from the wild can be estimated in developed countries, as it is rather specialised and the populations who exploit wildlife are rather limited social groups. However it is difficult to estimate in developing countries because rural communities depend far more extensively on gathering and hunting wild biota for their food, including, mushrooms, earthworms, small arthropods, etc.