Augustine Quek
National University of Singapore, Singapore
Title: Sustainable solutions for urban waste streams
Biography
Biography: Augustine Quek
Abstract
The notion of waste is apparent yet elusive in definition, resources out of place and things that no one wants are commonly cited but these definitions do not relate to negative environmental impacts of anthropogenic wastes. Waste is anything that pollutes is a starting point to examine the numerous wastes from cities that require sustainable solutions. This presentation will offer solutions for numerous urban waste streams such as food waste, sewage sludge and waste heat. These solutions include a high-efficiency three-stage anaerobic digester and a pilot, 1000-L anaerobic digester that converts food waste on campus to biogas. The performance of demonstration-scale gasifiers with commercial partners to treat horticultural waste will also be revealed. The technology for adsorptive cooling and dehumidification uses waste heat of lower-quality than current available technologies can, without sacrificing performance. These solutions were developed under the E2S2-CREATE programmer, a joint collaborative program between Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) and the National University of Singapore (NUS) under the Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) framework. To date, we have achieved a number of sustainable solutions for coupled problems in the field of waste management and emerging contaminants for Singapore and other megacities in Asia and around the world. E2S2 has conducted research and data collection in two sites of different size and complexity-the megacity of Shanghai and land-scarce Singapore.
