The chemical industry has an enormous need for innovation. To save resources, energy and time, currently more and more established chemical processes are being switched to biotechnological routes. This requires white biotechnology to discover and develop novel enzymes, biocatalysts and applications. Due to a limitation in the cultivability of microbes living in certain habitats, technologies have to be established which give access to the enormous resource of uncultivated microbial diversity. Metagenomics promises to provide new and diverse enzymes and biocatalysts as well as bioactive molecules and has the potential to make industrial biotechnology an economic, sustainable success.