Health-damaging PFASs are nearly impossible to break down—but a new hot-water technique can destroy them.
Perfluorinated and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, or PFASs, are considered indestructible chemicals. They are virtually nondegradable and accumulate in humans and the environment. Suspected health effects include asthma, cancer and changes in the reproductive organs. How to get rid of PFASs has been completely unclear until now—and the first approaches to destroying the resistant molecules are showing promising results.
The first attempts at using new methods to destroy these “indestructible” substances offer at least some hope. In the new EPA study, experts added oxidizing substances to water contaminated with PFASs and heated the liquid above its critical temperature of 374 degrees Celsius at a pressure of more than 220 bars. During this process, the water becomes what is called supercritical: it is neither a gas nor a liquid.
In the new study, it also turned out that the number of previously-identified PFASs in the water accounted for about a quarter of the substances in this category that had been destroyed. This shows that existing analytic techniques only identify a fraction of these chemicals. The variety of industrially used PFASs is so large that many of them are hardly known.
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