Technology

California Waste Solutions Expands Global Environmental Investment With More Than Half a Billion Dollars Proposed for Waste-to-Energy Project

Published

1 day ago

October 8, 2026

Oakland recycler California Waste Solutions anchors U.S. operations while expanding waste infrastructure and environmental technology in Vietnam through Vietnam Waste Solutions

OAKLAND, Calif., Oct. 7, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — California Waste Solutions, Inc. is extending its environmental work across the Pacific, pairing recycling operations in Oakland and San Jose with large-scale waste infrastructure and technology investment in Vietnam through its wholly owned subsidiary, Vietnam Waste Solutions.

California Waste Solutions proposes more than half a billion dollars for a waste-to-energy project in Vietnam.

The approach follows the operating principle that has guided the company since David Duong founded California Waste Solutions in Oakland in 1992 with eight used collection trucks. That principle centers on investing in systems that protect public health and recover value from waste.

“Investing heavily in the places you operate is one of the core differentiators of California Waste Solutions and its Vietnamese subsidiary. It’s not just something we do: it’s part of our core values,” said David Duong, Founder and CEO of California Waste Solutions.

These investments reflect the long-term vision of David Duong, founder and owner of California Waste Solutions and Vietnam Waste Solutions: to build environmental infrastructure that serves cities today while preparing for their future needs. Since establishing California Waste Solutions in Oakland in 1992, David Duong has developed a business spanning municipal recycling in California and integrated waste treatment in Vietnam. His approach connects investment in collection and processing with systems that recover materials, reuse treated water and generate electricity from waste. At Da Phuoc, the proposed waste-to-energy facility would extend that work through additional treatment capacity and energy recovery. Together with the Green Environmental Technology Park, it carries David Duong’s vision into projects intended to support Vietnam’s urban growth and long-term environmental needs.

U.S. Operating Base
Headquartered in Oakland, California Waste Solutions serves more than 343,000 customers across Oakland and San Jose and operates six Bay Area recycling facilities. The company provides collection, processing, material recovery, customer service and municipal recycling programs, including household battery and used-motor-oil collection and multilingual recycling education.

It continues to invest in sorting technology and facility capacity in California, including optical sorting in San Jose, artificial-intelligence scanning in Oakland, and the expansion of curbside household battery collection to San José homes. The company enters its thirty-fifth year in business next year.

“Thirty-five years is not just about how much the company has grown,” Duong said. “It is about the employees who helped build it, the cities that trusted us and the communities that gave our family an opportunity to build a new life in America. Our responsibility is to keep earning that trust.”

Da Phuoc Integrated Waste Treatment Complex
Through Vietnam Waste Solutions, California Waste Solutions operates the Da Phuoc Integrated Waste Treatment Complex on 128 hectares in Ho Chi Minh City. It is the only waste treatment facility in Vietnam that applies sanitary landfill technology in accordance with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards. Designed with a capacity of up to 10,000 tons per day, equivalent to approximately 70% of Ho Chi Minh City’s municipal solid waste, Da Phuoc Integrated Waste Treatment Complex currently receives approximately 4,500 to 5,000 tons per day, based on the city’s waste allocation.

Da Phuoc runs as a closed-loop system under strict environmental controls. Infrastructure includes:

A landfill gas-to-energy plant that collects methane through wells in the sanitary landfill and delivers it by pipeline to gas handling systems. The plant can generate up to 12 megawatts, supplying power for operations at the complex.A leachate treatment plant with capacity of 3,000 cubic meters per day, using a membrane bioreactor that combines biological treatment with membrane filtration. It was the first facility in Vietnam to apply this technology and is equipped with automatic, continuous, real-time wastewater monitoring. Treated water is reused for onsite irrigation and for washing waste-collection vehicles.A sorting and recycling plant with capacity of 600 tons per day, together with compost production from organic waste.

Helping Vietnam Achieve Net Zero By 2050

In line with the government’s roadmap for a green transition and a circular economy, Vietnam Waste Solutions is in the stages of applying for permits to expand its waste-to-energy systems. The plan is expected to contribute meaningfully to helping Vietnam achieve its net zero target of 2050.

The new waste-to-energy project is planned as a new investment, separate from capital already committed to the existing Da Phuoc complex. It is expected to require a total investment of more than half a billion dollars, with processing capacity of 3,000 tons per day and electricity generation of 60 megawatts, using advanced technologies from G7 and G8 countries. The project aims to reduce ash and residue remaining after incineration to about 5 percent, a target that depends on advanced incineration technology and tight operating controls. The remaining ash and residue will then be recycled into construction materials and other supplementary fuels.

The project has completed the documentation, technical and financial planning, and technology selection stages. Once investment-policy approval is received, construction is expected to begin, with the project becoming operational within 18 to 24 months, supporting Ho Chi Minh City’s Net Zero 2030 goal and the city’s near-term waste-treatment needs.

Vietnam Waste Solutions also plans to excavate, sort and process waste already stored at the landfill, then cap the site and rehabilitate the surface for a mixed-use ecological park for the local community.

“The visionary leadership of Ho Chi Minh City is building an environmentally sound future, and it’s a great pleasure to work with them on these objectives, especially with the economy so strong right now,” said Michael Duong, President of California Waste Solutions. “We are really excited about the new waste-to-energy plant expansion, having already proved that it works at a much smaller level over the past few years for our own plant.”

The company is also preparing to transfer sorting and recovery practices used in California, including AI- and robotics-assisted recycling, to raise material recovery and processing standards in Vietnam. At Da Phuoc, high-capacity drones for sanitation and odor control are scheduled to begin operation in October 2026, spraying biological treatment products across the landfill and reducing workers’ direct exposure to treatment chemicals.

Green Environmental Technology Park
Beyond Da Phuoc, Vietnam Waste Solutions is advancing the Green Environmental Technology Park, a 1,760-hectare project licensed in 2015 and planned as a Vietnam–U.S. Green Industrial Technology Complex. The project is designed to connect waste treatment with high-tech manufacturing, clean energy, telecommunications, environmental infrastructure and an internal cargo transshipment port, rather than function as a conventional land lease.

The aim is to build a U.S.-standard investment environment in Vietnam that helps tenants lower operating costs and meet ESG requirements. Plans also include high-quality housing and vocational schools to support a skilled local workforce. Infrastructure work has begun, with further investment to follow the approved roadmap and investment policy, tied to development across Vietnam’s Southern Key Economic Region.

Taken together, the California facilities and the Vietnam projects are meant to show the same standard at two scales: proven municipal recycling at home, and long-cycle environmental infrastructure abroad.

“California Waste Solutions started locally, but has expanded globally over the years, and significant investment has gone into the maintaining the same high standards we started out with in Oakland at the start of our journey,” said company founder David Duong. “Waste went from something no one wanted to talk about when we started out more than a quarter-century ago to something that now, everyone wants to talk about because they realize that how you handle it affects the environment in such a critical way. We are really proud to be one of the first in that respect, who saw it before many others did.”

About California Waste Solutions
Founded in 1992 by David Duong, California Waste Solutions provides recycling collection, processing, customer service, and material recovery for residential, commercial, and municipal customers in Northern California, including Oakland and San José. Through its subsidiary Vietnam Waste Solutions, the company also operates large-scale environmental infrastructure in Ho Chi Minh City. Headquarters: 1211 Embarcadero, Suite 300, Oakland, CA 94606. www.calwaste.com.

About Vietnam Waste Solutions
Vietnam Waste Solutions is the wholly owned Vietnamese subsidiary of California Waste Solutions and operator of the Da Phuoc Integrated Solid Waste Facility serving Ho Chi Minh City. Da Phuoc Integrated Solid Waste Facility (DPI) was developed as Vietnam’s first sanitary landfill modeled on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards. Existing operations include sanitary landfill management, recycling and material recovery, composting, leachate and wastewater treatment, treated-water reuse, landfill-gas collection and electricity generation. VWS is advancing the proposed 60-megawatt Da Phuoc waste-to-energy project and continues development of the Long An Green Environmental Technology Park.

Media Contact
Wendy Nguyen
PR & Marketing Manager
California Waste Solutions
wendynguyen@calwaste.com

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SOURCE California Waste Solutions

Technology

‘Kung fu tea’: US journalist Douglas’ journey into the art of Wuyi rock tea

Published

60 minutes ago

October 9, 2026

BEIJING, Oct. 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — A news report from chinadaily.com.cn:

Three hundred years ago, a British man stole the seeds of Wuyi rock tea to plant them elsewhere. Three centuries later, US journalist Douglas travels to Xiamei village at the foot of Wuyi Mountain in Fujian province to learn the age-old craft.

After the entire experience, he understands why people call it “kung fu tea”. For him, picking tea requires “eagle claw skills” and shaking the leaves demands “tai chi hands”. Every step is filled with a sense of mastery and dedication.

Why did Douglas travel all the way to Xiamei village to learn the art of tea-making? What are his insights on the 13,000 km Tea Road? Watch the video to find out.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kung-fu-tea-us-journalist-douglas-journey-into-the-art-of-wuyi-rock-tea-302903196.html

SOURCE chinadaily.com.cn

Technology

IQuest-Q1 Draws Early Developer Attention Across Coding and Agentic Workflows

Published

60 minutes ago

October 9, 2026

BEIJING, Oct. 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — IQuest-Q1 has drawn early praise from developers and industry watchers since launch, particularly for its performance on coding, software engineering, interactive application generation, and long-horizon agentic workloads.

The model weights and technical materials are publicly available:

GitHub — GitHub – IQuestLab/IQuest-Q1Hugging Face — https://huggingface.co/IQuestLab/IQuest-Q1Blog — https://iquestlab.github.io/

IQuest-Q1 is trained for the work developers actually do: navigating a repository, driving a terminal, calling tools, holding a long context in mind, and finishing multi-step tasks without losing the thread. Reasoning, tool use, long-context understanding, and multi-step execution were part of the training objective from the start — not adapted afterward.

Early external discussion has begun to explore IQuest-Q1’s capabilities. One highlighted its evaluation across application building, 3D spatial generation, code diagnosis and repair, and complex tool-assisted workflows, while another publicly shared use case described turning a written product brief into an interactive SaaS analytics dashboard. A third-party technical overview examined the sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture, integration with Claude Code and Codex CLI, and the infrastructure requirements of self-hosting a 320B-parameter model.

These early observations align with IQuest Research’s official demonstrations, which show IQuest-Q1 working across interactive application generation, code debugging, and multi-step tool use.

One-shot interactive applications

From a natural-language prompt, IQuest-Q1 emits runnable interactive apps in a single pass.

An FPS game. In one generation, the model produces the 3D scene, character movement, health, scoring, mode switching, and an in-game shop for resources and gear — code, file layout, interaction logic, and visuals in the same pass.

A racing game. Continuous scene extension — track geometry, foreground/background transitions — is where one-shot generations usually fall apart. IQuest-Q1 handles this class of spatially continuous, interaction-heavy app without special prompting.

Debugging a real RL run

IQuest-Q1 will also drop into an existing codebase and training stack and fix what’s actually wrong.

An RL run went off the rails. Starting from the training curves, the model pulled logs and execution traces, reasoned back through likely causes, and localized the bug in code. After the patch and a restart, it read the new metrics and confirmed recovery.

The root cause: a stray space had been inserted into the training trajectory. Removed, metrics came back up.

Multi-step work in a real environment

Given a workspace with heterogeneous information and tools, IQuest-Q1 runs multi-step tasks — reading, calling tools, and correcting itself as new information lands. In office settings it works across chat, cloud docs, spreadsheets, and comment threads, pulling context together into analysis, drafts, and revisions that are ready to hand off.

Architecture

The architecture and training approach behind these capabilities are outlined below.

Decoder-only Transformer with a sparse Mixture-of-Experts feed-forward. ~320B total parameters, ~15B active per token.

Training runs in three stages — pre-training, mid-training, post-training — bringing up code fluency first, then extending into longer, harder tasks.

Post-training focuses on software engineering, long-horizon agentic tasks, and general reasoning, using supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. On top of that, Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD) consolidates strengths from several teachers on the student’s own on-policy rollouts, so the student picks up capability without inheriting any one teacher’s bias profile.

Validated updates, datasets, and workflows feed into the next iteration. Pipelines, training configs, eval harnesses, and tooling are versioned and reused — capability work and infrastructure work compound instead of getting rebuilt each cycle.

Evaluations

IQuest-Q1 posts balanced results across benchmarks covering code, software engineering, terminal use, tool use, and agentic tasks:

NL2Repo — repository-level code generationCyberGym — cybersecurityTerminal-Bench 2.1 — terminal operationDeepSWE v1.1 — long-horizon codingJobBench — professional office workflows

Full numbers, baselines, and evaluation setup are in the technical report.

IQuest-Q1 was developed by IQuest Research. Developers and research teams interested in participating in upcoming early-access testing programs can apply for trial access via email: research@iquestlab.com

CONTACT:
IQuest Research
research@iquestlab.com

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SOURCE IQuest Research

Technology

INFiLED Launches NX Series for Stage Productions

Published

2 hours ago

October 9, 2026

SHENZHEN, China, Oct. 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — INFiLED, launched the NX Series in early October, a heavy-duty rental LED solution for stage productions. Developed for live events, touring productions, outdoor festivals and temporary indoor or outdoor installations, NX Series is designed for projects where LED systems must hold large structures, shift between stage forms and keep onsite work moving under tight schedules.

Recent INFiLED rental projects place the release in a real production context. Shenzhen Happy Valley‘s outdoor summer festival stage showed the scale of a layered five-screen rental layout, while UMK2026‘s live stage production reflected the precision required for large-format screens and overhead LED elements. Together, they point to stage environments where larger visual surfaces, dimensional design and tighter onsite schedules now converge.

NX is introduced for this kind of stage work, where creative direction and technical execution need to stay aligned from load-in to show time. The platform brings structural capacity, multi-form configuration, rental-ready protection, faster service and stable visual performance into the same system.

Larger Stages Ask More of the System

Large stage displays now do more than fill a background. They shape the scene, define depth and often become part of the performance architecture. Before content appears on screen, the LED structure has already passed through transport, lifting, alignment, rehearsal and operation.

NX is specified for stacking and hanging up to 20 m, with optional wind-resistant braces and locks for demanding sites. That capacity matters for large suspended or stacked LED structures, especially in outdoor environments where structural planning carries the whole production.

The cabinet design follows the same logic. A dual-layer magnesium cabinet keeps panels lighter in handling while retaining the rigidity needed for alignment, with cabinet weights of 6.8 kg and 10.9 kg across its two cabinet options. Top quick locks and bottom alignment pins support faster connection and more consistent geometry as the screen grows.

Creative Forms Need Repeatable Mechanics

Stage design rarely stays within a flat rectangle. Productions move between curves, staggered layers, stepped contours, wraparound corners and compact scenic structures. In rental work, those forms need to return accurately across different venues, crews and schedules.

NX supports flat displays, curved layouts, staggered and stepped surfaces, and heart-shaped creative forms. With NX Edge, the system forms 90° curved transitions for wraparound content. In selected configurations, NX also works with MC Series for right-angle and cube structures, and with Xmk3 Series for larger curved forms.

For precision curves, NX offers a –10° to +15° range in 2.5° steps. The degree-based adjustment gives designers room to shape the stage while giving technicians a clear mechanical reference during installation and repeat use.

Onsite Workflow Shapes the Final Image

A strong stage image depends on work the audience never sees. Load-in, locking, alignment, cabling, service and rehearsal all influence whether the screen stays on schedule and performs cleanly when the show begins.

NX addresses those pressure points through several rental-focused details:

Top quick locks and bottom alignment pins support faster assembly and consistent screen geometry.The unified integrated PDU centralizes power and signal distribution, reducing cabling complexity across the system.Optional clip-on masks for outdoor configurations reduce disassembly steps during onsite service.Outdoor versions feature full encapsulation and IP65-rated protection for exposed environments.

Visual performance remains part of the same production path. Outdoor stages need brightness that stays clear in stronger ambient light, so NX reaches up to 5,000 nits outdoors. A 7,680 Hz refresh rate supports smoother motion and camera capture, while 16-bit grayscale and a 10,000:1 contrast ratio preserve tonal control, depth and clarity for stage content.

NX Series expands INFiLED’s rental LED portfolio with a heavier-duty option for stage production applications where scale, form and timing carry equal weight. For INFiLED, whose work spans rental, fixed-installation and commercial display environments, the release adds another layer to its engineering focus – LED systems shaped around the conditions of real projects, not only around the appearance of the screen.

For stage teams, that focus matters most when the technology fades into the work. The structure holds, the workflow keeps moving and the image reaches the audience as intended.

Website: www.infiled.com
Contact: info@infiled.com

SOURCE INFiLED