Cracking the Code: A New Strategy to Eliminate "Forever Chemicals"

Hello Earth enthusiasts!

When you take a sip of water, you probably feel the cool, refreshing feeling of it as it travels down your throat. It's replenishing, especially after a run or playing a sport. When you drink water, you sip and swallow it without a single care. In fact, you probably don't even realize that there are chemicals in there (What?!).

Yes, you read that right. There are chemicals in the water that you drink every day. Specifically, PFAs (polyfluoroalkyl substances), commonly referred to as "forever chemicals", are found just about anywhere, from the water you drink to the soil beneath your feet.

PFAs contain carbon-fluorine bonds, which are notorious for being exceptionally resilient to degradation, allowing PFAs to last thousands of years. Because of these bonds, standard water treatment methods struggle to filter out PFAs and their toxic byproducts from drinking water, which sometimes pose serious environmental and health risks.

Luckily, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Rice University have proposed a revolutionary approach to use heterogeneous catalysis, the use of solid materials to speed up chemical reactions, to separate and mineralize PFAs into harmless byproducts.

The researchers use what they call a "treatment train" where PFAs are processed using different catalysts to break bonds. First, specific head groups of PFA molecules are removed. Then, fluorine atoms, the key to PFAS' resistance, are stripped away, which allows the remaining molecule to be turned into harmless substances like carbon dioxide, fluorine ions, and water. Each step uses a tailored catalyst to break down each part of a PFA. Researchers like to think of it as a relay race where PFAS are passed from one catalyst to the next until only harmless compounds remain.

A potential problem is that the catalysts can be attracted to other molecules, so researchers are utilizing machine learning to test which catalysts attract PFAS the best, ultimately enhancing the process.

Not only will this process ensure that we consume pure, safe, drinking water, but it will also help break down PFAS that are contaminating the environment, ultimately reducing the number of harmful chemicals our planet is exposed to.

Source: New roadmap advances catalytic solutions to destroy 'forever chemicals'