Recently, Chair Professor Chunmiao ZHENG's (School of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, SUSTech) team won 2nd prize in 2020 Environmental Protection Science and Technology Award for the project “Application of Technology to Prevent and Control Surface Water-Groundwater Pollution in River Basin”.

The Environmental Protection Science and Technology Awards are the highest accolades in ecological environment science and technology. The Awards Committee approved forty-four achievements and awarded five 1st prizes, thirty-seven 2nd prizes, and two Science Popularization Prize.

This award-winning project takes Shenzhen City as the research object. Firstly, the conventional pollutants, heavy metals and new pollutants in the drainage basin of Shenzhen city are detected quantitatively and qualitatively, and their concentration distribution in the urban basin, as well as their ecological and health risks, are evaluated. Based on this, the surface water-groundwater coupling model is used to study the hydrological process of the Shenzhen basin, which lays a foundation for exploring the process of pollutant migration and transformation. At the same time, SUSTech researchers came up with a variety of pollution remediation methods, including photodegradation, microbial degradation of new organic pollutants, antibiotic technology, and municipal sewage sludge resource disposal technology to solve the common problems of urban watershed pollution. The project also takes another 5 typically polluted areas as demonstration areas of various technologies in this study, considers the basin as a complete hydrogeological unit, and researches the spatial-temporal distribution of pollutants and integrated prevention and control technology.

Water pollution in the river basin presents a great challenge technically and economically. The project has accumulated some key technologies in river basin pollution detection, simulation, and remediation, which has a positive significance and role in promoting the technical progress of the industry. The research results can be popularized in the fields of surface water, groundwater, and soil remediation, which has a broad market and has been applied and recognized by many enterprises.

Chunmiao ZHENG is currently Chair Professor and Vice Provost of Global Strategies at SUSTech.  He is a fellow of both the American Geophysical Union and the Geological Society of America. He has also received numerous awards and honors, including the Birdsall-Dreiss Distinguished Lectureship and O.E. Meinzer Award from the Geological Society of America, and the John Hem Award and M. King Hubbert Award from the National Ground Water Association.

Other award-winners of Prof. ZHENG’s team are Research Associate Professor Shuping YI, Research Assistant Professor Wenhui QIU, and Professor Zuotai ZHANG. The project was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and Ministry of Science and Technology.