This Technology Wins the Shanghai Environmental Science and Technology Progress Award
A high-salinity organic wastewater treatment technology jointly developed by Hongji Environmental Protection and Tongji University won the Second Prize of the Shanghai Environmental Technology Progress Award. Addressing challenges in the energy, chemical and biopharmaceutical industries, this technology proposes a new approach of shifting from segmented treatment to whole-chain synergy, converting wastewater into resources.
The technology performs salt reduction and detoxification at the front end, recovers methane and achieves deep nitrogen removal at the mid stage, and converts salts into high-quality industrial salt at the end. The achievement is based on more than a decade of industry-academia-research cooperation, forming a closed loop of university mechanism research, enterprise pilot testing, and engineering implementation.
The "Key Technologies and Applications of Whole-Chain Low-Carbon Synergistic Treatment and High-Value Resource Utilization of Multi-Source High-Salinity Organic Wastewater," jointly completed by Hongji Environmental Protection and Tongji University, won the Second Prize of the Shanghai Environmental Technology Progress Award. The significance of this technology goes far beyond an award—it seeks to answer an industry question: can industrial wastewater become a resource rather than a burden?
The energy-chemical and biopharmaceutical industries are those where high-salinity organic wastewater is most concentrated and treatment demand is most urgent. This type of wastewater features coupled salinity and toxicity with complex composition. Traditional segmented treatment handles each stage separately, resulting in high energy consumption, low recovery rates, and a lack of coordination between stages.
The traditional approach treats wastewater as waste, trying to pay to eliminate it rather than extract value from it. Against the backdrop of the "dual carbon" goals and the construction of "zero-waste cities," this path has proven quite difficult.
The answer given by the joint team of Hongji Environmental Protection and Tongji University is "whole-chain transformation": reduce toxicity, extract energy, and turn salt into industrial raw material—enabling wastewater to complete its identity transformation from burden to resource.
The innovation of the project lies not in a breakthrough of a single process parameter, but in a shift of thinking—no longer pursuing single-point optimization, but building a complete chain from wastewater input to resource output, where every step paves the way for the next.
This technology system was not born of a flash of inspiration; behind it lies more than a decade of industry-academia-research cooperation.
Universities conduct mechanism research, enterprises carry out pilot-scale amplification and equipment mass production at industrialization bases, and the results are ultimately validated in real engineering projects. Every link has someone responsible, and every link reinforces the others. Hongji Environmental Protection calls this "enterprise-led, university-supported, collaborative innovation, and shared results."
This path has been repeatedly validated—from the Industry-Academia-Research Cooperation Award to the Environmental Technology Progress Award, from individual process packages to a whole-chain technology system. Industry-academia-research cooperation is not a slogan; it is Hongji Environmental Protection's methodology for continuously producing results.
The Environmental Technology Progress Award was established by the Shanghai Environmental Protection Industry Association, focusing on projects with quantifiable and promotable results, advanced and innovative technical models, and demonstrative value.
It confirms a path: starting from identifying real industry problems, tackling challenges through industry-academia-research collaboration, and ultimately speaking through engineering results. The salt in wastewater can become industrial raw material, the chemical energy in wastewater can become methane, and the pollutants in wastewater can become emission-reduction credits.