Field-tested knowledge on environmental engineering, lithium battery manufacturing, plant design and compliance — written for engineers who build the clean economy.
In 2024, I got a call from a former colleague. He'd spent 12 years designing municipal wastewater plants for a state-owned design institute in central China. Good engineer, solid…
Two years ago, a plant manager asked me whether AI could run his wastewater treatment system. I told him no. The technology wasn't ready, the sensors weren't reliable enough, and…
In March 2026, something happened that most plant managers I know completely missed. The National People's Congress passed the Ecological and Environmental Code — China's…
When you walk into a lithium battery factory for the first time, the scale is what hits you. Electrode coating lines 60-80 meters long. Formation rooms with thousands of cells…
If you generate sludge — and every industrial wastewater treatment plant does — you have to dewater it. Wet sludge costs money to dispose of. In many cases, it's the single…
The chemical feed system is the part of a water treatment plant that nobody thinks about until it stops working. Then suddenly the pH is wrong, the coagulant isn't dosing, and the…
I've prepared environmental impact assessments for chemical plants, steel mills, and water treatment facilities. When I looked at my first battery factory EIA, I expected it to be…
The battery industry has a fire problem. Not in the cells — in the factories that make them. A lithium battery factory contains all the ingredients for a fire: flammable solvents,…
NMP — N-Methyl-2-pyrrolidone — is the solvent used in cathode electrode manufacturing. It dissolves PVDF binder, creates a coatable slurry, and then evaporates in the dryer. At…
After the slurry is mixed, it goes to the coating line — a machine the length of a tennis court that spreads a thin layer of electrode material onto aluminum or copper foil with…
I've spent over a decade using AutoCAD Plant 3D to model water and wastewater treatment plants. When I started, I thought the hard part would be learning the software. It wasn't.…
There's a moment in every project review meeting where someone points to a rectangle on the P&ID labeled "Scrubber" or "Baghouse" and asks, "This one will work, right?" And…