Shu-Yuan (Sean) Pan

National Taiwan University | NTU · Department of Bio-Environmental Systems Engineering

Valorization of captured CO 2 is an important but challenging topic since CO 2 is a stable and relatively inert compound. Nonetheless, CO 2 valorization technologies should be sought after, because they can offer an opportunity for the sustainable carbon cycle towards a circular economy by creating value-added products and generate revenues from CO...

CO2 mineralization and utilization using alkaline solid wastes has been rapidly developed over the last ten years and is considered one of the promising technologies to stabilize solid wastes while combating global warming. Despite the publication of a number of reports evaluating the performance of the processes, no study on the estimation of the...

Global warming, driven by the accumulation of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, particularly CO2, in the atmosphere, has garnered significant attention due to its detrimental environmental impacts. To combat this critical issue, the deployment of CO2 capture and utilization (CCU) strategies has been considered as one of the technology-based solutions...

The global pursuit of net-zero carbon emissions has become one of the most critical challenges of the 21st century, as extreme climate events, rising temperatures, and environmental degradation force a reckoning with the carbon-intensive practices that define many of our industrial, agricultural, and energy systems [...]

The use of plastic has become deeply ingrained in our society, and there are no indications that its prevalence will decrease in the foreseeable future. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the global plastic waste disposal landscape, examining it through regional perspectives, various management technologies (dumping or landfilling, i...

This study proposes a novel framework that couples the general likelihood uncertainty estimation (GLUE) method with a deterministic forecasting approach to conduct a new uncertainty analysis approach for assessing the energy production of operational wind turbines installed in the Jhongtun wind farm at Penghu (an island in the middle of Taiwan Stra...

Different agricultural practices can pose significant threats to environmental quality and human health. This study aimed to assess the emissions of reactive nitrogen (NH 3 , NO x , and N 2 O) and carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) induced by fertilization in spinach and cabbage farmlands. Field and pot experiments were conducted to analyze the emission fluxes...

Depleting fossil fuels and changing global climate have led researchers to explore a sustainable and green ethylene synthesis towards carbon neutrality. Electrochemical carbon dioxide (CO2) reduction reaction via renewable energy (eCO2RR) has emerged as a promising green synthesis method for reducing ethylene production and reducing greenhouse gas...

An electricity-assisted anaerobic co-digestion (EAAD) process was developed and compared with conventional anaerobic co-digestion (AD) using piggery wastewater and rice husk as feedstocks. Various methodologies, including kinetic models, microbial community analyses, life-cycle carbon footprints, and preliminary economic analysis, were integrated t...

Microplastics (MPs) have garnered significant attention in recent years due to their potential detrimental effects on both bioenvironmental systems and human health. Numerous studies have documented the presence of notable concentrations of MPs in the effluent of wastewater treatment plants worldwide. Consequently, adopting a life-cycle approach is...

Agricultural wastes from cropping activities are always available with high production yield after containing organic-rich materials that can replace the commercial carbon-made components in the Microbial fuel cell (MFC) such as electrodes or catalysts. Although many studies reviewed the application of waste derived-biochar to develop a low-cost MF...

Reducing carbon dioxide emissions is one of the critical challenges to mitigate global climate change, which is having detrimental impacts on society and the environment. Fossil fuel combustion in transportation, power generation, and industrial processes is the dominant contributor to carbon emissions. Over the past decades, sustainable solutions...

The existence of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) in water is of serious interest due to their toxic, bioaccumulative, and persistent nature, and adsorption is an effective approach for the PFASs removal. In the present study, we developed a polymeric adsorbent by cross-linking chitosan and β–cyclodextrin using glutaraldehyde (Chi–Glu–β–...

The energy-consuming and carbon-intensive wastewater treatment plants could become significant energy producers and recycled organic and metallic material generators, thereby contributing to broad sustainable development goals, the circular economy, and the water-energy-sanitation-food-carbon nexus. This review provides an overview of the waste(wat...

The development of cost-effective and energy-efficient technologies to recover nutrients from digestate is important. Anaerobic digestate can be concentrated into bio-nutrient products through an electrodialysis (ED) process in an energy-efficient manner. Despite recent advances, the operation modes of ED for nutrient recovery from swine digestate...

Herein, we synthesized new and versatile magnetite-doped chitosan−ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (Fe3O4@CS−EDTA) composite for simultaneous capturing of multiple heavy metal ions: Hg²⁺, Cd²⁺, and Ni²⁺, and methyl orange (MO) dye from complex wastewater through adsorption process. We believe that EDTA in the synthesized adsorbent works as a cross-l...

Accelerated carbonation of industrial by-products such as yellow phosphorus slag (YPS) and basic oxygen furnace slag (BOFS) is an effective method to convert waste into valuable construction materials. Accelerated carbonation or CO2 sequestration can be conducted directly under dry or aqueous conditions. However, the slow reaction and low CO2 fixat...

The discharged saline wastewater has severely influenced the aquatic environment as the treatment performance of many wastewater treatment techniques is limited. In addition, the sources of saline wastewater are also plentiful from agricultural and various industrial fields such as food processing, tannery, pharmaceutical, etc. Although high salini...

While the worldwide distribution of geogenic arsenic (As)-affected groundwater is highly overlapped with the areas with abundant groundwater, utilization of As-contained groundwater is an inevitable compromise in those areas where surface water is not enough for irrigation. Since the occurrence of As in groundwater is often accompanied by high iron...

This study attempted to manage the food waste and soybean curd residue generated in Taiwan's National Ilan University by black soldier fly-aided co-composting. The food waste and soybean curd residue were co-composted with rice husk as a bulking agent in 4:1 ratio and 0.42 mg BSF/g waste. The higher organic matter degradation of 31.9% was found in...

The use of nitrogen fertilizers in agriculture produces significant quantities of nitrogenous gases including ammonia, nitric oxide, and nitrous oxide. Through better farmland management practices, the emission of nitrogenous gases can be reduced while realizing clean water environment and climate-smart agriculture. In this article, we first provid...

This study explores the current state-of-the-art in the detoxification and valorization of solid residues from municipal solid waste incineration (MSWI), especially fly ash, using plasma vitrification. The principles and advances in hazardous material elimination, resource recovery, and system integration using plasma vitrification for MSWI fly ash...

A well‐established electrode modifier, i.e., carboxylic acid (CA) functionalized‐multiwalled carbon nanotubes (f‐MWCNT), and a less explored safranin O (SFO) were fabricated on cuboidal graphite electrodes to develop two different voltammetric sensors for norfloxacin's electrochemical detection. The developed CA f‐MWCNT/graphite electrode and SFO/g...

Although many studies have been conducted to quantify microplastics in various aquatic environments, there is no easy and standardized analytical method or apparatus. Recently, a number of attempts have been made to standardize microplastic-measuring methods using micro-Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (μ-FTIR), Raman spectroscopy, or pyroly...

To explore more available water sources, reclamation of non-conventional wastewater for non-potable purposes in agricultural, industrial or domestic uses has attracted significant attention. For the security and safety of sustainable water services, in this Perspective, we first define the so-called concept of "green circularity", which considers f...

The sustainability of a transportation system is a major concerning factor for urbanisation, as evidenced by the ever-growing problems of air pollution issues in major cities. While the growing population and migration don't have too much control to overcome the widespread use of public and personalised vehicles, it has destroyed our global environ...

The rapid increase in steel slag generation globally highlights the urgent need to manage the disposal or utilization processes. In addition to conventional landfill disposal, researchers have successfully reused steel slag in the construction, chemical, and agricultural fields. With the large portions of alkaline silicate mineral content, steel sl...

Carbon capture utilization and storage is one of the most eminent technologies to mitigate climate change. Steel slag can be treated as a potential material owing to the large percentage of alkaline silicate minerals contained. Herein, a comparative evaluation of environmental impacts of producing artificial cold-bonded steel slag aggregates and pu...

A huge amount of agricultural wastes and waste activated sludge are being generated every year around the world. Anaerobic co-digestion has been considered as an alternative for the utilization of organic matters from such organic wastes by producing bioenergy and biochemicals to realize a circular bioeconomy. Despite recent advancement in anaerobi...

Biochar is a carbon-rich material prepared from the pyrolysis of biomass under various conditions. Recently, biochar drew great attention due to its promising potential in climate change mitigation, soil amendment, and environmental control. Obviously, biochar can be a beneficial soil amendment in several ways including preventing nutrients loss du...

Phosphodiesterase-5 inhibitors (PDE-5i, such as Sildenafil, Tadalafil and Vardenafil, mainly prescribed to treat erectile dysfunction) and their generic drug equivalents have been widely marketed and consumed in Korea. From the concentrations detected in wastewater, we could deduce that relatively large amounts of PDE-5i were consumed without a leg...

The accumulation of heavy metals in paddy rice severely impacts the health of consumers and plants. In this study, a systematic approach to source-sink apportionment of copper in paddy fields was developed by considering all bioenvironmental interfaces. Experimental data from two experimental fields (namely Field A and Field B) in the first harvest...

Due to the growing and diverse demands on water supply, exploitation of non-conventional sources of water has received much attention. Since water consumption for irrigation is the major contributor to total water withdrawal, the utilization of non-conventional sources of water for the purpose of irrigation is critical to assuring the sustainabilit...

This review systematically outlines the recent advances in the application of circular bioeconomy technologies for converting agricultural wastewater to value-added resources. The properties and applications of the value-added products from agricultural wastewater are first summarized. Various types of agricultural wastewater, such as piggery waste...

A novel electrothermal swing (ETS) system with gold-electrodeposited activated carbon fiber cloth (GE-ACFC) was developed to adsorb and sustainably recover low-concentration Hg⁰. GE-ACFC with an Au growth time of 1200 s displayed the largest Hg⁰ adsorption capacity and >90% removal efficiency. The Hg⁰ adsorption of GE-ACFC was dominated by physisor...

Despite the wide applications of dry anaerobic digestion (AD), a number of fundamental issues, such as composition-oriented estimation of biogas production and CO2 reduction potential, were not well understood yet. The objective of this study was to establish composition-oriented models for prediction of biogas production and the associated shift o...

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the major contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the main driver of climate change. Currently, CO2 utilization is increasingly attracting interest in processes like enhanced oil recovery and coal bed methane and it has the potential to be used in hydraulic fracturing processes, among others. In this review, the la...

In this article, we present a critical review of the reported performance of reverse osmosis (RO) and capacitive deionization (CDI) for brackish water (salinity < 5.0 g/L) desalination from the aspects of engineering, energy, economy and environment. We first illustrate the criteria and the key performance indicators to evaluate the performance of...

Fly ash from municipal solid waste incineration is considered as a hazardous waste, which would raise great threats on environmental safety due to the inherent toxic heavy metals and organic pollutants. In this study, we applied the life cycle assessment to evaluate the thermal plasma vitrification process for stabilization of fly ash from municipa...

Adsorption by ion-exchange resins has been widely used as a cost-effective method for removing numerous hazardous materials, particularly heavy metals, from aqueous solutions. For effectively detecting the illegal discharge of industrial wastewater containing heavy metals, we developed “time-lapse capsules” to trap metallic ions from water bodies....

In the past few decades, urban flooding and water shortages caused by the rapid expansion of cities and the destruction of construction ecology have been harshly lost. The current ecological rainwater management system is based on the traditional gray infrastructure and cannot effectively solve the water problems of different scales. Sponge city, a...

Global challenges of reliable energy and clean water presently require concerted approaches in water-energy nexus. Electrochemical methods for water treatment have gathered attraction because of several advantages, such as scalable, modular operations, promising distributed systems, and high energy efficiency. These advantages of electrochemical me...

Commonly observed competitive substrate inhibition in cometabolism of organic contaminants is used as rate- and reducing-power-determining factors to develop a kinetic model of the competitive cometabolism. Analogous to the well-known theory of Leudeking-Piret kinetics where the product formation demands reducing power, cometabolism is modeled as a...

The effective removal of organophosphorus compounds (OPs) effectively from water environment remains an important but challenging task. In this study, a resin-based nanocomposite of hydrated iron oxide (HD1) was used as Fenton-like catalyst for effectively catalyzing the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide to degrade tris(2-chloroethyl) phosphate (T...

In order to provide the real-time monitoring for identifying the sources of pollution and improving the irrigation water quality management, the integration of continuous automatic sampling techniques and cloud technologies is essential. In this study, we have established an automatic real-time monitoring system for improving the irrigation water q...

An integrated reclaimed process of refining slag with calcium-containing wastewater for CO2 mineralization and utilization by using a high-gravity carbonation process was proposed in this study. The effect of various liquid agents on calcium ion leaching behavior from the refining slag was determined and the mass-loss method was used to evaluate th...

The presented work aims to develop a novel and sustainable approach to adsorb and recover the low-concentration Hg0 in the off-gas downstream a distillation/condensation system in the recycling processes for waste Hg-containing devices. Hg0 adsorption and regeneration efficiency of raw and HNO3-treated activated carbon fiber cloth (ACFC) were exami...

Carboxymethyl chitosan (CMCTS) with active hydroxyl and amino groups is easily modified for chelating and capturing heavy metal, thus showing great potential for application in heavy metal-contaminated wastewater treatment. In this work, a dual-functional MACA copolymer [CMCTS-graft-P(AM-TGA)] with pH resistant was successfully designed and prepare...

As with all industrial processes, concrete production comes with environmental costs that are proportionate to its use. As such, approximately 8% of all, global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are related to cement and concrete. Combining new technology with the mass production of concrete offers one of the few feasible pathways to improve global ai...

The definition of green technologies should be any process, product or service that reduces negative environmental impacts while protecting human health and ecosystem quality [...]

The bauxite-derived adsorbent, activated alumina (AA), has a current annual global market of over 600 million USD, and of this more than one-third of AA is used for defluoridation of fluoride-bearing water. The commonly used Bayer process for production of AA suffers from thermodynamic inefficiency thereby raising costs, and also causes significant...

Carboxylated chitosan (CPCTS) is used as substrates in the design and synthesis of CPCTS-based flocculants through UV-initiated polymerization techniques. The synthesized flocculants are applied to remove Cr and Ni ions from chromic acid lotion and electroplating wastewater through two-stage flocculation. This study investigates the effect of flocc...

In order to ensure the viability of CO2 mineralization and utilization using alkaline solid waste, a mechanistic understanding of reactions at mineral–water interfaces was required to control the reaction pathways and kinetics. In this study, we provided new information for understanding the reactions of CO2 mineralization and utilization at minera...

A two stages process integration of high-gravity (Higee) rotating packed bed (RPB) and resin wafer electrodeionization (RW-EDI) technology was developed for CO2 mineralization, waste utilization and water reclamation. To stabilize and upgrade the properties of the municipal solid waste incineration fly ash (MSWI FA), accelerated carbonation was per...

Corn stover provides a great potential of bioenergy and biomaterial production through biorefinery, rather than being discarded as solid wastes. Appropriate pretreatments can enhance the biodegradability and digestion efficiency of lignocellulosics, and NaOH pretreatment is considered as an effective method. However, most NaOH pretreatments are usu...

Bioretention systems have been found to be potential candidates for the removal of various pollutants/nutrients from rainfall or stormwater runoff. Despite bioretention has been widely developed for the removal of nutrients from stormwater, effective removal of both phosphorus and nitrogen is still a challenge. Hence, in this study, bioretention sy...

Wastewater treatment can consume a large amount of energy to meet discharge standards. However, wastewater also contains resources which could be recovered for secondary uses under proper treatment. Hence, the goal of this paper is to review the available green energy and biomass energy that can be utilized in wastewater treatment plants. Comprehen...

Emerging pollutants introduced into surface water pose potential hazards to the safety of drinking water. In this study, the removal performance of three emerging compounds (exemplified by caffeine, diclofenac and octylphenol, with different physico-chemical properties) from synthetic water and source water by combining activated carbon (AC) adsorp...