The International Water Association (IWA) recently announced the winners of the 2024 Project Innovation Awards (PIA) at the IWA World Water Congress and Exhibition. The Beijing Fangzhuang Urban Wastewater Anammox Project , jointly submitted by Beijing Drainage Group and BJUT, won the gold medal in the Breakthroughs in Research and Development category—the first time an Asian project has earned this distinction since the category's inception.

The IWA, the world's largest professional water industry organization with over 70 years of history, brings together nearly 10,000 top experts in water science from around the world, all focused on advancing sustainable water resource management. The PIAs, launched in 2006, are internationally recognized, awarding gold, silver, and bronze medals in the Breakthroughs in Research and Development category to promote excellence and innovation in water management, research, and technology. This year, the Beijing Fangzhuang Urban Wastewater Anammox Project stood out among 108 projects from 34 countries and won the gold medal.

BJUT and Beijing Drainage Group have a history of longstanding collaboration. Over the past 20 years, with BJUT's technological support, Beijing Drainage Group has built the first five of the world's large-scale high-ammonia anammox projects treating sludge dewatering liquor from anaerobic digestion after thermal hydrolysis, achieving the largest application scale globally. Building on this foundation, a team led by Academician Peng Yongzhen from BJUT, in partnership with Beijing Drainage Group, addressed major challenges such as achieving partial nitrification in municipal wastewater, cultivating the necessary microbial strains, and ensuring stable operation. Together, they developed an efficient nitrogen removal process using partial nitrification and anammox. This collaboration also enabled the long-term stable operation of the low-ammonia partial nitrification-anammox process at the Beijing Fangzhuang Wastewater Treatment Plant, demonstrating the feasibility and engineering advantages of anammox for urban wastewater nitrogen removal. The award holds significant importance for advancing low-carbon, compliant emissions in the wastewater treatment industry, both in China and globally.

Leveraging BJUT's National Engineering Laboratory for Advanced Municipal Wastewater Treatment and Reuse Technology, Academician Peng Yongzhen and his team have been at the forefront of research on biological wastewater treatment. Their groundbreaking work in low-energy nitrogen removal and carbon reduction for urban wastewater has led to major technological breakthroughs. The team discovered and stabilized the partial denitrification process and was the first to propose coupling it with anammox technology. They were also the first in this field to publish 10 papers in Tier 1 SCI journals and to introduce a new "partial anammox" approach for municipal wastewater treatment. Their research output ranks first globally in both the number of published papers and citations. As of July 2024, the team has contributed 15 of the 60 highly cited ESI papers in the field of anammox, accounting for one-quarter of the total.