The Clifford W. Randall Distinguished Lecture
September 21, 2018
Herbert H. P. Fang
Emeritus Professor of Environmental Engineering
The University of Hong Kong, HKSAR, China
Dr. Herbert H.P. Fang is a Fellow of ASCE and the Emeritus (and former Chair) Professor of Environmental
Engineering at the University of Hong Kong. He received BSc from National Taiwan University (1965) and PhD from
University of Rochester (1972), followed by three years of postdoctoral research at University of Illinois – Urbana
Champaign (1972-75). After 12 years of industrial experience in New York, he joined the University of Hong Kong in
1987 and had taught there for 27 years until his retirement in 2014. Professor Fang is an expert in environmental
biotechnology and is the recipient of several prestigious research awards, including China’s State Scientific and
Technological Advancement Award in 2008. He served at the editorial board of seven international journals, and was a honorary/visiting professor of 11 universities in China and Taiwan. Since his 2014 retirement, Professor Fang has continued to receive citations by over 3,000 SCI journal papers in the past 4 years.
“Environmental Anaerobic Technology — Applications and Recent Developments in China and Japan”
Asia has been the world leader in the past few years in applying Environmental Anaerobic Technology for various aspects of pollution control, particularly for the treatment of industrial wastewaters with recalcitrant pollutants and co-digestion of various semi-solid wastes. Anaerobic technology, also known as fermentation, has been applied by humans for millennia, initially for food preservation which had soon developed into a number of products for the
satisfaction of human’s spiritual and culinary appetites in the forms of wine, beer and various kinds of food. More recently, the pharmaceutical industry has also applied fermentation for the productions of valuable medicines. In the past few decades, Environmental Engineers have made tremendous advancements in the applications of such technology.
Although Americans are credited for its initial success in the late 1960s, this technology has, however, been mostly overlooked in North America in the past decades. This presentation is to navigate through the development of this technology and the gradual shift of its center of gravity from the US to Europe, and more recently to Asia, especially China and Japan. Dozens of recent slides will be presented on its wide ranges of applications in Asia for the treatments of wastewaters and semi-solid wastes. Special emphasis will be put on its applications for domestic wastewater and wastewaters from petro-chemical/pharmaceutical industries, co-digestion of various wastes, and resource recovery. A number of case studies and recent developments will be discussed in more details.