Dangerous ‘forever chemicals’ can be destroyed with ‘promising’ new tech, study says
“Forever chemicals,” manufactured compounds that don’t break down naturally, are everywhere.
They’ve seeped into the water, soil and air across the globe, according to the EPA. They’re even accumulating in the bodies of most Americans, coursing through their veins and posing numerous health risks, according to the CDC.
But a new breakthrough technology using ultraviolet light aims to eradicate these dangerous chemicals, technically known as perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), researchers wrote in a study published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials Letters.
The process, now patent-pending, involves blasting a mixture of contaminated water and hydrogen with “high-energy, short-wavelength” UV light, researchers said. While hydrogen makes the water molecules more reactive, the beams of light initiate a chemical reaction that pulverizes the pollutants, breaking them into smaller, harmless particles.
“This one-two punch breaks the strong fluorine-to-carbon chemicals bonds that make these pollutants so persistent and accumulative in the environment,” researchers wrote in a Dec. 12 University of California, Riverside, press release, adding the process is “very sustainable.”
No unwanted byproducts or contaminants are released in the cleanup process, researchers said.
“After the interaction, hydrogen will become water,” Haizhou Liu, a University of California associate professor and coauthor of the paper, said in the release.
The hope is that the technology can be scaled up in the future to handle greater quantities of water, researchers said, potentially protecting millions from negative health effects associated with PFAS, such as reduced fertility and immune function.
However, the sheer ubiquity of PFAS — components in household products such as food packaging and furniture now present in the food we eat and air we breathe — makes at least one expert dubious of the new technology’s potential.
“To think that you can take incredibly tiny concentrations of these compounds out of water, for example drinking water, using some technology is simply absurd because of the scale that’s involved and the cost of doing it,” Terrence Collins, Teresa Heinz professor in green chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University, told McClatchy News.
Aside from innovative technological efforts, federal and state officials have moved to restrict the use of PFAS in recent years and increase transparency around their use. The EPA proposed designating two of the most commonly used PFAS as hazardous in 2022, and half a dozen states have sued manufacturers of PFAS, contending they are a public health threat.
One Ohio lawsuit, filed in 2018 against DuPont, a multinational chemical company, argued the firm continued to release a PFAS despite knowing it could cause harm. The lawsuit added that the chemical has been linked to testicular and kidney cancer and thyroid disease, among other issues. McClatchy News has reached out to the company for comment.
“These are murderous chemicals,” Collins said. “We are harming every living thing in the biosphere with [them]...The only answer to our dilemma is to stop making them or at least to stop putting them in highly distributed technologies.”
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