Forever Chemicals No More? PFAS Are Destroyed With New Technique (nytimes.com) 72
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: A team of scientists has found a cheap, effective way to destroy so-called forever chemicals, a group of compounds that pose a global threat to human health. The chemicals -- known as PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances -- are found in a spectrum of products and contaminate water and soil around the world. Left on their own, they are remarkably durable, remaining dangerous for generations. Scientists have been searching for ways to destroy them for years. In a study, published Thursday in the journal Science, a team of researchers rendered PFAS molecules harmless by mixing them with two inexpensive compounds at a low boil. In a matter of hours, the PFAS molecules fell apart. The new technique might provide a way to destroy PFAS chemicals once they've been pulled out of contaminated water or soil. But William Dichtel, a chemist at Northwestern University and a co-author of the study, said that a lot of effort lay ahead to make it work outside the confines of a lab. "Then we'd be in a real position to talk practicality," he said.
At the end of a PFAS molecule's carbon-fluorine chain, it is capped by a cluster of other atoms. Many types of PFAS molecules have heads made of a carbon atom connected to a pair of oxygen atoms, for example. Dr. Dichtel came across a study in which chemists at the University of Alberta found an easy way to pry carbon-oxygen heads off other chains. He suggested to his graduate student, Brittany Trang, that she give it a try on PFAS molecules. Dr. Trang was skeptical. She had tried to pry off carbon-oxygen heads from PFAS molecules for months without any luck. According to the Alberta recipe, all she'd need to do was mix PFAS with a common solvent called dimethyl sulfoxide, or DMSO, and bring it to a boil. "I didn't want to try it initially because I thought it was too simple," Dr. Trang said. "If this happens, people would have known this already." An older grad student advised her to give it a shot. To her surprise, the carbon-oxygen head fell off. It appears that DMSO makes the head fragile by altering the electric field around the PFAS molecule, and without the head, the bonds between the carbon atoms and the fluorine atoms become weak as well. "This oddly simple method worked," said Dr. Trang, who finished her Ph.D. last month and is now a journalist.
Unfortunately, Dr. Trang discovered how well DMSO worked in March 2020 and was promptly shut out of the lab by the pandemic. She spent the next two and a half months dreaming of other ingredients which she could add to the DMSO soup to hasten the destruction of PFAS chemicals. On Dr. Trang's return, she started testing a number of chemicals until she found one that worked. It was sodium hydroxide, the chemical in lye. When she heated the mixture to temperatures between about 175 degrees to 250 degrees Fahrenheit, most of the PFAS molecules broke down in a matter of hours. Within days, the remaining fluorine-bearing byproducts broke down into harmless molecules as well. Dr. Trang and Dr. Dichtel teamed up with other chemists at U.C.L.A. and in China to figure out what was happening. The sodium hydroxide hastens the destruction of the PFAS molecules by eagerly bonding with the fragments as they fall apart. The fluorine atoms lose their link to the carbon atoms, becoming harmless. [...] Dr. Dichtel and his colleagues are now investigating how to scale up their method to handle large amounts of PFAS chemicals. They're also looking at other types of PFAS molecules with different heads to see if they can pry those off as well.
At the end of a PFAS molecule's carbon-fluorine chain, it is capped by a cluster of other atoms. Many types of PFAS molecules have heads made of a carbon atom connected to a pair of oxygen atoms, for example. Dr. Dichtel came across a study in which chemists at the University of Alberta found an easy way to pry carbon-oxygen heads off other chains. He suggested to his graduate student, Brittany Trang, that she give it a try on PFAS molecules. Dr. Trang was skeptical. She had tried to pry off carbon-oxygen heads from PFAS molecules for months without any luck. According to the Alberta recipe, all she'd need to do was mix PFAS with a common solvent called dimethyl sulfoxide, or DMSO, and bring it to a boil. "I didn't want to try it initially because I thought it was too simple," Dr. Trang said. "If this happens, people would have known this already." An older grad student advised her to give it a shot. To her surprise, the carbon-oxygen head fell off. It appears that DMSO makes the head fragile by altering the electric field around the PFAS molecule, and without the head, the bonds between the carbon atoms and the fluorine atoms become weak as well. "This oddly simple method worked," said Dr. Trang, who finished her Ph.D. last month and is now a journalist.
Unfortunately, Dr. Trang discovered how well DMSO worked in March 2020 and was promptly shut out of the lab by the pandemic. She spent the next two and a half months dreaming of other ingredients which she could add to the DMSO soup to hasten the destruction of PFAS chemicals. On Dr. Trang's return, she started testing a number of chemicals until she found one that worked. It was sodium hydroxide, the chemical in lye. When she heated the mixture to temperatures between about 175 degrees to 250 degrees Fahrenheit, most of the PFAS molecules broke down in a matter of hours. Within days, the remaining fluorine-bearing byproducts broke down into harmless molecules as well. Dr. Trang and Dr. Dichtel teamed up with other chemists at U.C.L.A. and in China to figure out what was happening. The sodium hydroxide hastens the destruction of the PFAS molecules by eagerly bonding with the fragments as they fall apart. The fluorine atoms lose their link to the carbon atoms, becoming harmless. [...] Dr. Dichtel and his colleagues are now investigating how to scale up their method to handle large amounts of PFAS chemicals. They're also looking at other types of PFAS molecules with different heads to see if they can pry those off as well.
What? How does this help? (Score:3)
great so all we have to do is collect it from the entire surface of the earth, because it's in the rain in antarctica and tibet, then boil all of it for hours.
that's super practical. problem solved
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If PFAS really area. problem (I don't think they are, but I digress). Instead of cutting back on it, what we might need to do is bioengineer a fish or a photosynthetic organism such as cyanobacteria to contain a metabolic pathway that can degrade it. That might be hard, but should be doable. What is really difficult would be to prevent the organism from shutting off that pathway because it may find it useless and a burden .. there has a be a survival reward for degrading PFAS .. I'm not sure if that is poss
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If PFAS really area. problem (I don't think they are, but I digress). Instead of cutting back on it, what we might need to do is bioengineer a fish or a photosynthetic organism such as cyanobacteria to contain a metabolic pathway that can degrade it. That might be hard, but should be doable. What is really difficult would be to prevent the organism from shutting off that pathway because it may find it useless and a burden .. there has a be a survival reward for degrading PFAS .. I'm not sure if that is possible. There may need to be a virus that infects cyanobacteria that don't have a functional PFAS degradation pathway.
That would be one way to handle it. Not exactly super simple though. You're talking about some pretty hard-core genetic engineering. A challenge with ideas like that though is that often these human-introduced contaminants are a problem in the environment because they're things that are useful to us. There are so many PFAS to worry about because we manufacture them for use on textile coatings and non-stick cookware, etc. If we develop micro-organisms that eat those things and release them into the environme
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Factory treatment BEFORE it becomes pollution. Don't see how this solution works on pollution.
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Do we actually treat or "recycle" plastic wastes properly in a global scale? I think this is the major issue here. Those chemicals are in consumer products intentionally. No "treatment" within manufacturing process can help.
Without that, we can't stop the pollution.
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PFAS isn't just in plastic, it's everywhere. In fact, the first signs of a problem with PFAS come from the people who avoid plastic - firefighters. They're used to add fire resistance to things, and even though the bunker gear and other safety pr
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Firefighters I believe have switched to gear not using PFAS these days for obvious reasons, but that's more to limit the accumulation in their blood than anything else.
According to the TFA, it looks like the easy solution is just to extract the firefighters blood and boil it with lye and dimethyl sulfoxide and then put it back in. Nice and simple.
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One way is at the water filtration step. Probably the most important thing to do is remove this crap from our water supply and luckily that isn't difficult to do. While destroying these molecules is difficult they can be separated with simple carbon filtration. This gives a method for destroying the PFAS we've separated from our drinking water.
Because humans are globally spread our drinking water processing is basically part of the global water cycle now and the rest of that cycle will continue to flush PFA
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Stop them? I don't think anything will stop them altogether anytime soon.
But it rains and the rain flushes PFAS from the ground your vegetables are growing in into the ground water where it becomes drinking water. Or they end up the food you speak up and most of them come out in urine, most right away and more over time and the urine again ultimately becomes drinking water. Water follows a cycle and that cycle will just keep on flushing out PFAS and so long as we are destroying more than we input, the overa
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PFAS can be filtered cheaply from drinking water with simple carbon filtration. Flush the carbon and apply this process. Continually engaging in this process at all water processing facilities directly attacks the pollution.
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But William Dichtel, a chemist at Northwestern University and a co-author of the study, said that a lot of effort lay ahead to make it work outside the confines of a lab. "Then we'd be in a real position to talk practicality," he said.
You wouldn't come across as the know nothing dunce you so obviously are.
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You're one of those, "if it doesnt solve all the problem it doesnt solve any of it" people arent you?. How about just filtering them from our drinking water? That alone is solving a significant problem and is very doable if this truly is cheap and scalable.
Don't get me wrong, we should also be trying to find replacements for these things so we can stop using them but that's not going to help with what's already out there.
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great so all we have to do is collect it from the entire surface of the earth, because it's in the rain in antarctica and tibet, then boil all of it for hours.
that's super practical. problem solved
Right, because the first solution found in a few months of initial laboratory testing is as good as it's going to get. No way that additional research could improve the technique.
chemical soup (Score:2)
Chemical soup for the win!
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50 years from now they'll find out the "cure" has its own problems, rinse, repeat...
Re: chemical soup (Score:5, Interesting)
DMSO is an... unpleasant ... lab reagent.
In addition to having a pungent odor, and a tendency to degrade into MSO, it also is very able to penetrate unprotected skin, and carry dissolved organic molecules in with it.
This process would require a fume hood to do safely, or you risk becoming saturated with the dissolved pfas.
Industrially, if the goal is to prevent its release, boiling it in a solvent and venting the gas may not be the wisest choice.
The real science here is understanding how this solvent alters bond angle/energy of the pfas. Alternative reagents may become possible with better understanding.
Also flourine.... (Score:3)
FTA:
"The fluorine atoms lose their link to the carbon atoms, becoming harmless."
Elemental flourine is anything but harmless. Its one of the nastiest gases you could have the misfortune to encounter.
Re: Also flourine.... (Score:2)
Given the reactivity, it probably decomposes the dmso, producing fluoridated sulfur compounds.
Re: Also flourine.... (Score:2)
With sodium hydroxide, sodium fluoride is another likely reaction product.
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Re: not cheap (Score:3)
Dmso has a lower specific heat than water.
Re: not cheap (Score:2)
wouldn't the PFAS be in rainwater or drinking water. I'm not sure I am all that interested in destroying purified lab samples that I paided real money for.
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If you insulate, keeping it at a constant temperature is almost free. And the effluent can be passed through a heat exchanger that does most of the work of heating the incoming material.
our over regulated world (Score:2)
gee i'm sure it's really tough to figure out if chemicals are "forever" chemicals.
Somehow, new ones get added to the list like clockwork.
precisely the kind of stuff regulations should be able to stop, and yet don't.
but someone on the internets told me there's just too much darn regulation and that's why we all have such horrible lives.
Re: our over regulated world (Score:3)
if a chemical does not degrade in the natural environment faster than we add it, then that is a valid cause for concern.
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> precisely the kind of stuff regulations should be able to stop, and yet don't.
> but someone on the internets told me there's just too much darn regulation and that's why we all have such horrible lives.
Can't tell if this is sarcasm. The right move is massive population wealth and therefore an end to permitted externalities. More people left abject poverty in the last 30 years than any other time in human history and we should only accelerate that.
Sure it's imperfect but moving all the pollution to C
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The right move is massive population wealth and therefore an end to permitted externalities. More people left abject poverty in the last 30 years than any other time in human history and we should only accelerate that.
Yes because greater affluence in your scenario some how magically won't increase consumption like it has every single other time throughout history. As long as these chemicals are in the supply chain they're a problem and that wont change one little bit with affluence. Plenty of these chemicals are used right here in good ol' affluent USA.
Good for water treatment (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't anyone bother to study writing nowadays? (Score:2)
"Unfortunately, Dr. Trang discovered how well DMSO worked in March 2020 and was promptly shut out of the lab by the pandemic."
There are much better ways to word this. It's not that difficult.
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From how I understand it, it's just saying COVID19 comes from the DMSO process developed by Dr. Trang
Low boil after extraction from soil (Score:2)
Basically they're still forever chemicals.
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You know, way back when Einstein created general relativity, he looked into the future and declared that one day it would be good for satellite-assisted navigation. However, bright individuals such as yourself immediately started whining it was too expensive to get stuff into orbit.
Tell you what, go get a degree in chemistry and discover some way break down a particular kind of chemical polluting the environment. This will be a novel discovery for a chemical no one has been able discover how to break down.
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I was criticizing the hype in reporting.
Illiterate cunt.
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So it's going to cost a lot...
Speaking of illiteracy, from the very first line in TFS
A team of scientists has found a cheap, effective way to destroy so-called forever chemicals
But don't let that slow down your shit talking!
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Just how dangerous are they? (Score:1)
A big deal is made out of them lasting almost forever but so does water so what is their effect on the enviroment and plant and animal biochemistry? Googling doesn't bring up much except hand waving scare mongering. Does anyone actually know?
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There is no conclusive evidence yet one way or the other. The CDC lists [cdc.gov] what we do know, which seems sufficient to apply the precautionary principle [wikipedia.org] for now.
Note that it doesn't work for all PFAS (Score:2)
In particular, it doesn't work for PFOS.
Anything but fix the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
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https://dailycaller.com/2012/1... [dailycaller.com]
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But I guess they are too busy doing this.... https://dailycaller.com/2012/1... [dailycaller.com]
But Mmm... Who doesn't want cold chicken shit soup on tap? Yummy!
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"It boggles the mind they let corporations use chemicals like this where the benefit is marginal at best. If they know something contaminates aquifers, does not decompose and has little social value ban it!"
The people who did not die because the firefighting foam put out the fire might dispute the marginal benefit claim.
How long those foams were in use before they found out they did not decompose might also be a consideration. The best technology available at the time does change, but it was still the best
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It boggles the mind they let corporations use chemicals like this where the benefit is marginal at best. If they know something contaminates aquifers, does not decompose and has little social value ban it!
PFAS were relatively unknown. We have literally never made a snap decision on the banning materials like this based on variable and emerging research, which is precisely what this is. About all we know about them is they don't degrade. There is no conclusive link between PFAS and negative impact to society.
But I guess they are too busy doing this....
Too busy doing research in understanding PFAS in every way, including understanding their health impacts, and understanding if there are breakdown mechanism. Good. This is precisely what we should be doin
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Dastardly!
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Fair enough.
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We should also ban or limit production so PFAS don't get into our environment, but it's also good to have more solutions for dealing with it since there's already quite a lot of it out there
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No, we shouldn't do that either
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So rather than ban or limit the production of PFAS, they're proposing hair-brained, completely impractical schemes to try to clean it up in the wild.
How on earth would this ever be a solution for PFAS in the wild? That's so absurd I don't know why you even bring it up.
What this is good for is treating our drinking water. If it's as cheap as claimed and scales there's not reason this couldnt be attached to our water systems. Yes that doesnt solve the whole problem but it does solve some of it by reducing exposure. Even If forever chemicals were outlawed tomorrow they'd still be in our drinking water after all.
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!00% on point. That doesnt mean this isnt a worthwhile development though.
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So rather than ban or limit the production of PFAS
Scientists don't have the authority to ban or limit production of anything.
they're proposing hair-brained, completely impractical schemes to try to clean it up in the wild.
Nope, they proposed an experiment to find out how to chemically break down a PFAS, something which currently we have no knowlege of. Their results worked, quite the opposite of hair-brained. They made no claims about nor were trying to be practical, and absolutely no one is suggesting boiling the environment is the solution.
Sounds like the oil industry with its continuous pollution into rivers
No one in industry is involved.
AKA, business as usual.
Yes, scientists do science experiments in lab to help our understanding of the w
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Jello Biafra says: (Score:3)
Crypto Wonder Drug In vogue
Some people say it cures arthritis
Maybe that's why it keeps getting banned
It's absorbed directly through the skin
Mix it with lemon juice, touch your fingertips
You'll taste the lemon.
The police
Started a riot
Down at the courthouse
Again
Running amok
Spilling blood
Bashing heads
I do my part, behind the lines.
Swabbing door handles of cop cars with DMSO mixed with LSD.
We're halfway there... (Score:2)
a team of researchers rendered PFAS molecules harmless by mixing them with two inexpensive compounds at a low boil.
Good thing the planet is warming!
Feels like clickbait (Score:2)
Trump was half right (Score:2)
He got the part right about injecting bleach into yourself to kill bad things- but he missed the DSMO and jumping into a vat of boiling water.
With this simple at-home recipe you can eliminate all toxins from your body.
Reminds me of quicklime and PCBs. (Score:2)
About 30 years ago, it was found out, by accident, that quicklime and sunlight can breakdown PCBs. If memory serves me correctly, there was a contaminated site that they could not dig out right away, so they put in some quicklime to keep the PCBs from leaching further. When they came back, they couldn't find the PCBs anymore. With a bit of testing, it turned out that quicklime plus UV radiation broke down the PCBs.
Now quicklime is far less of a problem that DMSO, but as others have said, if you know you