A friend of mine with two children had a minor emergency this weekend. While she was putting one child to bed, the other was in the bathtub. The only problem was, she had forgotten to turn off the taps.
Hearing a loud “Mummy!” she hurried to the bathroom, stopped the flow of water and started mopping the floor.
This reminded me of some of the claims being made about solving the PFAS crisis. You can mop all you want, but there is no point if you haven’t turned off the taps. The same goes for “forever chemicals”.
There is a great deal of talk about remediation – the fancy word for cleaning up contaminated soil or water. Europe’s new strategy for water resilience, issued this month to deal with shortages and pollution, says it will tackle PFAS by working with the private sector to achieve “a technological breakthrough in feasible and affordable methods for remediation”.
You don’t need to be an Einstein to understand what this means: A. no such technologies exist right now, and B. it is not clear when or whether they ever will.
“Relying on clean-ups is like bailing out a sinking boat with a teacup”
What technology can do
Don’t get me wrong, PFAS remediation is a very good thing. Many PFAS-polluted sites urgently need to be cleaned up. But relying on clean-ups is like bailing out a sinking boat with a teacup while the crew is busy drilling new holes in the hull.
First, PFAS remediation technologies are limited in what they can do. They are mainly useful for lowering high concentrations of PFAS. Eliminating PFAS completely from an area is almost impossible.
There are many technologies out there, but most work in two steps: First, you concentrate the PFAS as far as possible in a defined volume of soil, sludge or water, then you treat that concentrated volume in different ways (see box).
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There are many places where such methods obviously won’t work. For example, how would you remove PFAS from rain or the bloodstreams of wildlife and humans?
Then there are ultra short chain PFAS called TFA. The EU’s environment commissioner has acknowledged that TFA is one of the PFAS found most often in European water and says she is committed to a clean-up. But not all technologies can deal with TFA, while those that can are expensive and inefficient.
Finally, the sheer number of polluted sites, and therefore the huge costs of remediation, limit the positive impact of these clean-ups. Europe alone has over 23,000 PFAS-contaminated sites. The cost of remediating them could be as high as €2 trillion over 20 years, or €100 billion annually.
“It does not matter how much PFAS we take out if we keep on pumping them in”
And what it can’t
Remediation technologies are useful to clean specific, limited and defined volumes of soil, water or sludge. But it does not matter how much PFAS we take out of the environment if we keep on pumping them in.
Until we stop production and restrict the use of these substances, pollution levels in the environment will only increase, causing further damage to human health and creating yet more need for remediation.
This is the key reason we cannot rely on technology alone to solve the PFAS crisis. The production and use of “forever chemicals” are the root of the problem – and there’s only one way to deal with that. Ban PFAS!
Anne-Sofie Bäckar
Executive Director at ChemSec
What technologies are there?
Of the following established remediation methods, the first three separate the PFAS from water or soil, but do not destroy them – you are still stuck with PFAS-laden waste:
1. Granular activated carbon: Captures PFAS from contaminated water through adsorption, but at high cost.
2. Ion exchange: Synthetic resins attract and bind the PFAS molecules.
3. Membrane separation: High pressure is applied on one side of the membrane, forcing water through the pores while trapping PFAS molecules on the other side.
4. Supercritical water oxidation: Breaks PFAS down in water at high temperature and pressure – at high capital cost.
5. Electrochemical oxidation: Uses electricity to degrade PFAS in water at the molecular level. Still under commercial refinement.
Other new technologies for PFAS remediation are mostly based on laboratory studies under ideal conditions that do not represent the size or complexity of PFAS-contaminated areas. Additionally, high energy intensity, costs, and reactor design limit the extent to which they can be scaled up to deal with large volumes.
