Before the course began, Jiang Weiqun, Vice President of the Association and Chairman of Jiangsu Lanbisheng Chemical Environmental Protection Co., Ltd., delivered a speech. It was not long, but carried great weight: "The growth speed of the second generation directly affects the staying power of enterprise development, and also touches the energy and expectations of the older generation. The industrial landscape is being reshaped, and the baton of environmental protection will ultimately be handed to young people."

With just a few words, he explained the original intention of the Growth Camp—small scope, deep exchange, and emphasis on practical combat, so that every student becomes a participant in the next stage of the industry, not just a listener.

The main speaker of this course, Zhou Min, is a 2026 National May 1st Labor Medal winner and Director of the Sinò French Water Research Center. He completed his undergraduate studies at Fudan University and pursued further studies at ParisTech in France, and has been rooted in the front line of water services in chemical industrial parks for more than ten years. He has led the completion of more than one hundred technical research projects, obtained 70 authorized patents, and participated in the formulation of 5 industry standards.

But he also has an identity that makes students feel close to him—the video account science popularization host "Xiao Zhou Who Understands Environmental Protection," who tells hardcore technology as popular science stories watched by tens of thousands of people.

The two classes have different entry angles, but the underlying perspective remains consistent.

The first class started from policy. Every major transformation of the environmental protection industry almost begins with a policy document. Understanding the direction of policy is to see the logic of market changes in advance. The "15th Five-Year Plan" released clear signals: digital and intelligent transformation of the monitoring system, list-based management of new pollutants, water conservation moving toward rigid constraints, emerging industries creating supporting demand, and continuously tightening emission standards for industrial parks.

Zhou Min threw out a viewpoint: every sentence in a policy text may become tomorrow's order and the day after tomorrow's track—the key is how you read it. He showed a chart—six future industries corresponding to six types of environmental protection product opportunities. Embodied intelligence corresponds to precision cleaning wastewater, brain-computer interfaces correspond to high-value small-volume wastewater, biomanufacturing corresponds to high-concentration organic fermentation wastewater...

Policy is never distant thunder, but the wind direction beneath your feet.

The technological breakthrough points are equally clear: synthetic biology moves microorganisms from "passive domestication" to "active design"; new materials greatly increase the treatment density per unit tank volume of biochemical systems; and new pollutant treatment forces the simultaneous upgrading of detection and degradation technologies. But he repeatedly emphasized one boundary: the more cutting-edge the technology, the more biosafety and compliance constraints must be put in place in advance.

What about AI? He opened with a "Water AI Tool Landscape," clearly laying out the corresponding relationships between mainstream models at home and abroad, and then landed on the three most mature implementation scenarios: wastewater plant process control, knowledge management libraries, and smart pipe network prediction. His judgment was crisp and clear: "It is not AI that replaces engineers, but engineers who can use AI that replace those who cannot."

After the two classes ended, the second half had just begun. Each student spoke one by one—there were no standard answers to the questions: How can AI be implemented in one's own process? How should the communication effect of new media be evaluated? How should the disposal direction of saline water be chosen? What should be done if by-product salt cannot be sold? Where is the safest entry point for track transformation? In which scenarios can one's own products be combined with AI...

Zhou Min did not give "standard answers," but threw the questions back to the scene. Chairman Jiang Weiqun and second-generation camp mentor Wu Changmin also joined in responding. Views gradually became clear through back-and-forth exchanges: Yixing's environmental protection scenarios are too rich—dozens of subdivided fields and project sites across the country are precisely the best experimental fields for new technologies. Other people's cases are inspiration; Yixing enterprises' scenarios are the real soil.