MANY MINDEDTwo ways to destroy PFAS, the 'forever chemicals'
Researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf have reported two ways to break down PFAS, the 'forever chemicals' whose durability comes from stable carbon-fluorine bonds. PFAS number more than 10,000 industrial compounds. One route uses hydrodynamic cavitation; the other pairs cold atmospheric plasma with gas dispersion. The two appeared in Chemical Engineering Journal Advances and in Scientific Reports.
The cavitation work, begun in 2022 and led by Dr. Ysabel Huaccallo-Aguilar, forces contaminated water through a constriction, creating vapor bubbles that collapse and briefly expose attached PFAS to spikes of several thousand degrees Celsius; in tests on PFOS it broke down about 37% of the dissolved molecules, against a target of exceeding 80% degradation and mineralizing over half the bound fluorine. The plasma method, from Dr. Amit Kumar, runs at ambient conditions with no catalysts or additives and almost fully degraded both long- and short-chain PFAS, releasing about 35% of the bound fluorine as fluoride salts. A separate group at the UFZ confirmed the degradation and fluoride release.
If either scales, the payoff is a genuine commons repair: a way to destroy PFAS rather than just filter and relocate it, as most cleanup does. That matters for drinking water and soil — high PFAS levels were recently found in the Elbe — and the work is tied to Germany's National Water Strategy.
The state of play is early. Neither process is commercially viable; the plasma route is faster but uses far more energy per liter than cavitation; and the plasma reaction throws off many transformation products, including gases, not yet studied and possibly hazardous. The team is scaling volume from about 50 milliliters toward 5 liters and plans to combine the two methods. Some PFAS are suspected of harming genetic material and raising cancer risk; the effects of many others are unknown.
Source: Phys.org