A student team from Prof. Guanghao Chen of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at HKUST struck award at the grand final of the HKUST One Million Dollar International Entrepreneurship Competition on 8 Oct., 2018. The team made up of Weiqi Xue, Zeng Qian and Dr. Tianwei Hao, two PhD students and a former postdoc of Prof. Chen, was awarded the Third Award among 35 finalists through six open competitions in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Macau, Beijing, and Foshan respectively in 2018, participated by 970 start-up teams in total.
The team displayed an innovative sludge treatment technology via producing sulfated polysaccharides (a widely used industrial feedstock) from sludge generated in municipal wastewater treatment plants as well as their business model and future plan to put this technology into real application. Given the high price and market demand of industrial grade sulfated polysaccharides, this technology could be the most economically valuable resource recovery-orientated sludge treatment approach, which can off-set the cost for sludge treatment completely.
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