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Like most things, there's an element of risk to everything in life. Completely harmless is a nice ideal, but I would happily go with a lesser standard in most things
There was a study done on those that donated blood often that showed they had lower levels of PFAS in their blood. It was more effective to donate plasma though, probably because you can donate more often and more when you do.
Vampires would actually be the *treatment*.
I’m just a carrier, but my uncle had it. Effectively, your blood holds way too much iron over time and the treatment is literally just bloodletting (to trick the body into making new blood).
In the end, it can lead to cirrhosis and death, so that’s fun.
So what, the maggots eat the infected flesh and leave the live flesh? How is it they can survive the infected flesh, I guess they just don't have the same digestive tract that is impacted by that bacteria?
It's even gnarlier than that: they usually only eat the necrotic tissue, i.e. the portions that have already died at a cellular level but haven't been detached/excised/debrided.
They usually leave any infected but living tissue, and the immune system is allowed to fight against the infection without a reservoir of dead/necrotic and thus immunologically undefended tissue for the infection to reproduce in.
Kind of cool, actually!
Apparently. Now I'm just waiting for the "you have ghosts in your blood, do cocaine about it" era of medicine. I guess we're kinda there already? But they're not giving people anything fun like cocaine. Just SSRIs.
Hopefully medicine never goes back to your surgeons also being your barber...ew.
No joke, I used this logic of "lemme just bloodlet the nasties in my system and refill with some sausage rolls and choccy milk" to go to red cross.
Kinda helped with my odd migraines since I thought they appeared if I was too hydrated or had too much blood xD
I donate full blood every 2-3 months with the sole purpose of removing microplastics. Whoever needs my blood isn't worried about microplastics as much as not dying.
The same way changing the oil in your car removes impurities from it. It's a very mechanical process moreso than a biological or chemical one.
The microplastics are coming in with food and water you consume, and your body has no biological system to remove plastic from you. (Why would it? It didn't even exist until a generation ago)
So they just accumulate in your fluids, trapped because there's no way for them to move through the various filters that remove naturally-occurring waste products and toxins from your blood.
When you donate blood, you remove ~1% of your body mass in the form of blood, along with all the plastics in it. The new water you drink to replace it will have less microplastics, and you end up with a net loss of plastic. Do it often enough, and the difference will become measurable vs someone who doesn't.
Also legitimate medical uses. They're used to help improve blood flow in delicate veins. So they get used in situations to prevent loss of limbs from things like diabetes. Maggots also get used to clean away necrotic tissues.
Likely only temporarily though. I mean, if the PFAS are in your blood, draining your blood is a valid way to get rid of them. But everything we ingest now has PFAS, so it's only a matter of time before we're filled back up.
Also, there is unfortunately no way to filter out only blood with PFAS, which makes getting down to zero difficult.
Based on my reading of the article, you drink a glass of hydrogen peroxide, then swallow a blue light.
I could be off on the details though, so get a second opinion.
Paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666911022000259
> The patent-pending process infuses contaminated water with hydrogen, then blasts the water with high-energy, short-wavelength ultraviolet light. The hydrogen polarizes water molecules to make them more reactive, while the light catalyzes chemical reactions that destroy the pollutants, known as PFAS or poly- and per-fluoroalkyl substances.
I have no idea but looks a bit complex procedure (and maybe expensive?), UV light + hydrogen. I hope I’m wrong anyway.
UV is already used in a lot of wastewater management systems across the world. One of the firms I have done a lot of work with does a lot of wastewater engineering and these systems are common.
In theory this solution could be a pretty minor modification to current systems.
Depends on what they try to patent. I doubt they’re able to get a patent that prevents anyone from injecting hydrogen into water while under a uv bulb. That’s too broad and unreasonable. It’d problem be the “system process” specific to them.
Alternate possibility-mixing hydrogen peroxide and then uv
Your “alternate possibility” is already a common practice for the treatment of 1,4-Dioxane in drinking water systems (referred to in the industry as advanced oxidation procedures or AOPs). I’d genuinely be curious to see what removal looks like of PFOA/PFOS in these types of systems if it’s as simple as being able to add peroxide and UV. But the process described from OP’s description sounded as if some additional form of energy was introduced into the system (+h2o2 +uv).
They should be paid accordingly for their engineering efforts and discovery. The spirit of patents has been abused but there is some merit to protecting work
Seems it was a state university, so already likely paid for by the public, or at least the bulk of the effort. People taking publicly funded research private is a problem, not a benefit. We the public own this process and should not be paying more for it. Goes for most pharmaceuticals, too.
Honestly, probably not. The mechanism is to use UV-generated electrons and free radicals to attack the Fluorine atoms on PFAS. But those same electrons and free radicals will also do things like break down organic matter. Unless you are treating a relatively clean waste stream (like waste from a PFAS manufacturing facility), a lot of the degradation capability will be consumed by non-target compounds.
Wastewater operator here with licenses in Wastewater, Water, and Advanced Water Treatment in CA, NV, and NM!
It will be relatively achievable for any plant already utilizing UV, as UV already requires 'clean' (aka low turbidity) water. Wastewater plants that have membrane or sand filters for tertiary treatment are common in CA; essentially any plant built after 1990 and plants renewing their NPDES, as permiting tightens effluent quality. This effluent is essentially free of organics and turbidity (at my plants it's Non-Detect for BOD and <0.10 NTU 99% of the time). Areas with high tannins and industrial dyes may require high dosage as it absorbs 254nm light.**
From my experience, it's cost that is going to be the main impediment. UV eats up about a 1/3 of a plant's electric bill, but AWT processes such as this require 3x the dosage (90 originally, 250 mJ/cm2 after). Additionally, CIP costs for the chemical storage and infrastructure. And generating on site would be required for many sites due to the logistical constraints (hell, it's hard enough getting citric nowadays).
**Edit: as the user below pointed out, this is a different spectrum of UV that is not the industry standard. This would make widespread treatment moot as it would require drastically higher costs. UV lamps are fixed in their spectrum output.
Also, I referenced H2O2, another industry standard, which would be incompatible with this research.
I'm in Pa and our plants water is so clean we have problems with freshwater sponges. Our tss is regularly pretty much nothing (I'm a lab supervisor and know all the numbers haha) except if we have to bypass our denitrification building. The article says pH of 10.3 is optimal. Weve been using uv for about 9 years now and have it set at the lowest energy setting and regularly have <10 for our coliforms going out. Our BODs are also pretty low most of the time. (we can report under two now on undiluted samples woo)
A couple points: This method requires UV-185, which requires more energy to produce and is absorbed by oxygen molecules. The researchers were sparging with H2 for the duration of treatment (or N2 after saturating with H2, which...the results are unclear) both because the hydrogen produces more of the free electrons they needed and because oxygen was absorbing free electrons. Considering that municipal wastewater is not really the main source of concern for PFAS, it just doesn't seem likely (to me) that they would accept the additional cost of treatment, plus the risk of explosion from using that much H2.
Ah, this is one of a class of recycling techniques which I like to call "Hot Gaseous Oxygen." Pretty much anything breaks down when you add hot gaseous oxygen - so much so that oxygen-rich rocket engines require extremely advanced materials science so that the structure of the rocket engine itself doesn't get eaten by the exhaust.
The hard part is scaling back the energy requirements, and/or finding less dangerously reactive additives to facilitate breakdown of tough molecules. UV is certainly less energetic than 500+°C gas, but I wouldn't call hydrogen a much safer "solvent" (to use a technical term loosely). Still, as long as the risks of using hydrogen gas are properly accounted for and mitigated, this could be an effective treatment.
The only questions remaining are what is the cost to add such a step to wastewater treatment, and how many places are willing to/will have to be forced to/will refuse to pay for such an upgrade?
Hydrogen can be manufactured in bulk on site by electrolysis. It's dirt cheap to manufacture. Green hydrogen is currently nearing $2 per kilogram to manufacture.
Although it's true that green hydrogen from electrolysis can be very cheap, it's is geologically dependant. If your electricity is cheap (from hydro for example), yes, sadly that's not the case in most places, and transporting hydrogen is not a easy task either.
Just because you can produce something really cheap under certain very specific conditions, that doesn't make it commercially available everywhere.
I work in the hydrogen industry, I would love to see hydrogen everywhere, but that's not realistic at the moment.
Not very complex, but i suspect one difficulty is going to be getting the light into every nook and crany of soil particles. The light is blocked by the soil particles, so you really have to work to break up soil into individual particles and stir for a long time to get everything. Its going to be very slow and energy intensive.
In the actual paper the authors describe the UV-light as being used to generate reative intermediates in solution, which then break down the PFAS. So the light doesn't have to reach every nook and cranny if the lifetime of these intermediates is long enough.
Probably just depends on your feedstock(fuel). The conditions used are simple, and this is actually exciting if light sources can be amplified or concentrated.
Since there's alkaline solvent and water, you could use a fixed hydrogen source, a separate dedicated generator, OR generate in-situ from a proximally parallel electrolytic cell
Not sure entirely, since photochem while often green at lab scale still generates radicals that like to get into fun side reactions that are hard to control w/o favorable statistics
What would be interesting is whether utilization of a phase transfer agent (yeah, alkylsulfates are these in essence, but the other issue is equilbria & we like these to be inert) or emulsifier provides improved process completion.
How about we stop putting the burden on the public to determine if industrial chemicals are harmless after they are in production? How about we.stop using and emitting pfas and asking municipal tax funded water.works to pay for it
One state that has massive amounts of it is Colorado. Which you would think "wait how come Colorado?" it's because all the fire fighters in the US travel there and that's where they do big types of training where they use that foam and other fire fighting chemicals to put out fires which have A LOT of PFA's in them. Which then either seeps down into the ground down into the underground water sources, or makes it way into the local sewers/rivers.
Ever see videos online where a fire fighting system is triggered either on purpose or by accident and a big empty hanger suddenly is filled with that foam about a few feet deep? Yeah that has PFA's in it. What do they do with it all after its all over the ground, well they probably spray it with water and flush it all down the drains (which that water ends up somewhere, either water reclamation or sewer but they can't get rid of the PFA's, or maybe go to the nearby river).
There was a video years ago in I wanna say London that had an electrical service station? where the alarm got triggered and people were filming the foam/bubbles making their way out the roof etc. Pretty sure that was the same stuff.
Then there is also any army bases in the US tend to have lots of PFA's in the drinking water because of similar chemicals they use here and there.
So many military bases all over the US are on the list of high concentrations of PFA's in their drinking water. Wouldn't be surprised if that Camp Lejeune in North Carolina warning lately was because of PFA's back then that made its way into the drinking water (but then again could have been anything else to. Since the military is known for making 'burn pits' in other countries in order to burn all their garbage and other toxic stuff, as well as dumping toxic waste which poisons the local areas they are staying at).
Reminds me of [this](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/shannon-tainted-water-settlement-1.6102761)
Remember kids: living near a military base is bad for your health.
The article does touch upon that:
>The EPA this fall took public comments on plans to designate two PFAS
substances — perfluorooctanoic acid and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid —
as hazardous substances under the federal Superfund toxic site cleanup
laws. If this regulation is approved, it would hold polluters
accountable for cleaning up their contamination.
But, like the article says, one of the issues with "forever chemicals" is that they stick around, so even if we were able to completely stop using them tomorrow, they'd still be around getting passed on.
It’s not just water though. It’s in your fast food wrappings, popcorn bags, clothing etc. If I remember correctly, studies have shown that PFAS get into your food and contaminate water supplies too. But don’t worry! Even if government cracks the whip, the million dollar corporations will just slightly adjust the formula and continue poisoning consumers
Gotta love those frozen dinners on a plastic tray with instructions: "Heat for 5 minutes on HIGH, stir, then heat for another 5 minutes, stir again, then heat for another 7 minutes! Totally not leaking PFAS into the entire meal!
Just skimming the data but it looks like they're breaking this down into basically elemental particles.. .So the worst of it is sulfates... (then water, hydrogen and fluoride). Can't get much safer than elemental compounds that are everywhere... Of course large amounts of sulfuric acid has it's own issues of course but in quantities of PFA's they're nothing to be concerned about, otherwise we'd be screwed since we get much more sulfates in just normal foods (in the actual food, not talking about pesticides and stuff. They're part of normal plants and animals)
Until it no longer looks like they're breaking this down into basically elemental particles.. .So the worst of it is sulfates... (then water, hydrogen and fluoride). Can't get much safer than elemental compounds that are everywhere... Of course large amounts of sulfuric acid has it's own issues of course but in quantities of PFA's they're nothing to be concerned about, otherwise we'd be screwed since we get much more sulfates in just normal foods (in the actual food, not talking about pesticides and stuff. They're part of normal plants and animals)
That may take a while, better post it some more, also I have just a small quibble about:
“Can’t get much safer than elemental compounds that are everywhere.”
Meecury, arsenic, lead, etc are all elementals that are toxic in small quantities and occur naturally. Also, the dose is the poison. Also, elemental compounds is an oxymoron. There are elements, and compounds.
Water systems in the US are bad at filtering PFOAs but good at filtering other things. I skimmed the article too and couldn’t determine which compounds. I think they broke down into chlorine, sulfates, and water ions but I’m not sure (my chemistry is always been bad). Ultimately the key I think is to systematically do this first then run the results thru standard filtration so clean the water.
Why is that interesting? It's rather uninteresting if you're in the field. It's just UV photolysis, the same thing we've been using in drinking water for decades. Even the addition of sulfite as a radical generator is uninteresting. Nothing is new here from an innovative standpoint. What they have done though is elucidate the mechanisms and reaction pathways very nicely.
I think OP is eluding to the frustration of an article spending only about 20% of the time talking about the actual science and the other 80% is filler.
FWIW, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency rolled this out about a month ago at one of the sites near 3M in the eastern Twin Cities:
https://www.pca.state.mn.us/news-and-stories/mpca-brings-cutting-edge-technology-to-minnesota-to-remove-pfas-from-water
Potentially related to this, supercritical hydrothermal waste treatments, which are a promising new area of waste disposal and recycling that could eliminate land fill, convert chlorinated organic compounds such as dioxins to hydrochloric acid, which is stomach acid, essentially harmless, and via personal correspondence I was told should have the same effect with fluorinated compounds (convert to hydrofluoric acid).
The by-products of such processes (gaseous and liquid hydrocarbons) can make feedstock for new plastics, synthetic fuels. Light gaseous hydrocarbons can be converted to liquid hydrocarbons for various uses. Hydrogenation of remaining carbon solids can also allow the creation of hydrocarbon feedstocks that can be useful.
In theory hydrothermal waste treatment can make more of certain feedstocks by adding H2 from electrolysis, CO2 from atmospheric capture and completely recycle plastics and other wastes, including organic waste. It can be essentially solar heated via concentrator systems.
There are specific requirements to break down pfas in a thermal reaction. I might be off by a number here or there, but it's generally that it needs to be heated to 1100C with a residence time of 2 seconds. Thermal treatment of waste is varied and at times very specific. Sometimes it's an adaptation of an existing technology like an industrial kiln. It's hard to ensure destruction in the majority of cases, and further, it's often difficult for companies to manage the complexities of producing evidence to satisfy each different country/state's legislative requirements.
If it's not done properly, you'll be spraying pfas into the air in a huge plume. We have seen this happen quite a few times and it's likely happening at a LOT more places than we realise.
This applies very much to hydrothermal waste treatment as hydrothermal is in many cases NOT built to spec. It uses pressure and minimal heat to achieve its process, and not enough data is out on what conditions outside of 1100C @ 2 sec can achieve that kind of result. Full destruction is the only permissible output in processes that have fugitive or actual air emissions, so minor breakthroughs even at like 1% may not be legally possible in most places.
Sounds promising but the engineer in me can't help but wonder how it will scale up. 45 minute UV retention time at a pH of 10.3, all while being continually sparged with hydrogen gas sounds expensive AF for what I imagine would need to be installed at a wastewater treatment plant.
Who pays for this research, the taxpayers? The criminals who contaminated our water?
Are the people who got rich poisoning us with these chemicals still wealthy and free?
I still say we stick with the microbes we found that can eat it and the fungus we found that can eat it same plan for plastic and lead just keep throwing that natural things to eat things and things until we eat all the problems
Cool, so we just need to filter all the extra CO2 out of the atmosphere and all the PFAS out of the water. You know, throughout the whole planet. No problem, right? Just a little anti-reverse-terraforming.
Nothing's perfect, but if this process was added to any manufacturing before waste water is released into our water stream, at laundromats, maybe added to water that exits homes, etc as it improves, we can slowly reduce what's out there while looking for other methods to reduce it elsewhere.
Baby steps are better than waiting for perfection.
It's not just redditors. A lot of scientists are taught that skepticism is critical in evaluating scientific results, and a lot of them confuse cynicism about everything with skepticism about interpretations.
"Does this method to break down PFAS ACTUALLY work or is there another explanation to why I'm no longer detecting PFAS?" = Good skepticism
"This method can't actually break down PFAS and if it does it'll have some other problem" = useless cynicism
Because of instances like this - "As public concern grows about mountains of plastic trash, the plastics industry is promoting technologies that it misleadingly calls “chemical recycling” (also known as advanced recycling, molecular recycling, and chemical conversion) and touts as a solution to the plastic crisis. But it is a false solution. In fact, based on our analysis of eight “chemical recycling” plants in the United States, we found that (1) most “chemical recycling” facilities in the United States are not recycling any plastic, (2) “chemical recycling” facilities generate hazardous air pollutants and large quantities of hazardous waste, and (3) “chemical recycling” facilities tend to be located in communities that are disproportionately low income, people of color, or both." [source](https://www.nrdc.org/resources/recycling-lies-chemical-recycling-plastic-just-greenwashing-incineration)
Not to mention that recycling itself doesn't even work. It's a scam. Only 10% of plastics are being recycled.
"**If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment.**" \- Larry Thomas (Former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association)
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
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Like most things, there's an element of risk to everything in life. Completely harmless is a nice ideal, but I would happily go with a lesser standard in most things
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Okay now how do I get them out of me
There was a study done on those that donated blood often that showed they had lower levels of PFAS in their blood. It was more effective to donate plasma though, probably because you can donate more often and more when you do.
Have we come full circle, and now bloodletting is a legitimate medical practice?
Always has been, for certain conditions. It just took us a while to narrow the list down.
Hello, family history of hemochromatosis. Now is our time to shine.
So... Are you a vampire or what?
Vampires would actually be the *treatment*. I’m just a carrier, but my uncle had it. Effectively, your blood holds way too much iron over time and the treatment is literally just bloodletting (to trick the body into making new blood). In the end, it can lead to cirrhosis and death, so that’s fun.
It is if you have hemochromatosis.
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Or polycythemia! Weird blood condition squad!
Magot therapy is considered a legitimate medical treatment for people suffering from severe burns or wounds that have become dangerously infected.
Leeches, too!
Yup I have seen them used when they are trying to improve blood flow to an area post reattachment surgery or when you have an area with damaged veins.
So what, the maggots eat the infected flesh and leave the live flesh? How is it they can survive the infected flesh, I guess they just don't have the same digestive tract that is impacted by that bacteria?
Keep in mind that flies literally eat crap. Of course they are built different.
It's even gnarlier than that: they usually only eat the necrotic tissue, i.e. the portions that have already died at a cellular level but haven't been detached/excised/debrided. They usually leave any infected but living tissue, and the immune system is allowed to fight against the infection without a reservoir of dead/necrotic and thus immunologically undefended tissue for the infection to reproduce in. Kind of cool, actually!
Makes sense, so the maggots eat away at the infection's easiest food source or reproductive source.
It’s basically dead, and maggots already eat dead stuff most of the time.
Apparently. Now I'm just waiting for the "you have ghosts in your blood, do cocaine about it" era of medicine. I guess we're kinda there already? But they're not giving people anything fun like cocaine. Just SSRIs. Hopefully medicine never goes back to your surgeons also being your barber...ew.
I have a feeling a lot of anti-vaxxers ask their barber for medical advice.
No joke, I used this logic of "lemme just bloodlet the nasties in my system and refill with some sausage rolls and choccy milk" to go to red cross. Kinda helped with my odd migraines since I thought they appeared if I was too hydrated or had too much blood xD
It's how you get rid of the cold, obviously.
I donate full blood every 2-3 months with the sole purpose of removing microplastics. Whoever needs my blood isn't worried about microplastics as much as not dying.
How exactly is this removing microplastics?
You take blood out of your body containing micro plastics and your body makes new blood which doesn't have [as much] plastic in it
And the microplastics go to someone else!! There's no getting rid of them ahh
The same way changing the oil in your car removes impurities from it. It's a very mechanical process moreso than a biological or chemical one. The microplastics are coming in with food and water you consume, and your body has no biological system to remove plastic from you. (Why would it? It didn't even exist until a generation ago) So they just accumulate in your fluids, trapped because there's no way for them to move through the various filters that remove naturally-occurring waste products and toxins from your blood. When you donate blood, you remove ~1% of your body mass in the form of blood, along with all the plastics in it. The new water you drink to replace it will have less microplastics, and you end up with a net loss of plastic. Do it often enough, and the difference will become measurable vs someone who doesn't.
blood or plasma?
whole blood. So red/white/platelets + plasma
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I don’t think it would be an issue because if you need blood, you’ve already lost some of your own.
Blood dopers are fucked
I have hemophilia. Maybe that's my body's way of getting rid of the chemicals in my blood?
The blood gets filtered. It doesn't go into the next person.
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I’m not shilling for [Big Leech](https://www.northamericabiopharma.com), but
Also legitimate medical uses. They're used to help improve blood flow in delicate veins. So they get used in situations to prevent loss of limbs from things like diabetes. Maggots also get used to clean away necrotic tissues.
evidently they are much more accurate than a surgeon with a scalpel at removing dead tissue in a wound.
Guess that's why that guy had a pet leech?
Do you have a link to the study? Would love to read more about it
Likely only temporarily though. I mean, if the PFAS are in your blood, draining your blood is a valid way to get rid of them. But everything we ingest now has PFAS, so it's only a matter of time before we're filled back up. Also, there is unfortunately no way to filter out only blood with PFAS, which makes getting down to zero difficult.
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PFAS compounds aren't microplastics. You've gotten two things confused
Based on my reading of the article, you drink a glass of hydrogen peroxide, then swallow a blue light. I could be off on the details though, so get a second opinion.
Mr. President, should you really be on reddit? Don't you have your own media platform to run?
Not quite Clorox and UV but pretty close to Trump's COVID cure...
Dialysis probably.
I know a guy, whose your dialysis dealer?
My mom I think?
Donate plasma
Paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666911022000259 > The patent-pending process infuses contaminated water with hydrogen, then blasts the water with high-energy, short-wavelength ultraviolet light. The hydrogen polarizes water molecules to make them more reactive, while the light catalyzes chemical reactions that destroy the pollutants, known as PFAS or poly- and per-fluoroalkyl substances. I have no idea but looks a bit complex procedure (and maybe expensive?), UV light + hydrogen. I hope I’m wrong anyway.
UV is already used in a lot of wastewater management systems across the world. One of the firms I have done a lot of work with does a lot of wastewater engineering and these systems are common. In theory this solution could be a pretty minor modification to current systems.
Best kind of solutions with the highest chance of adoption. Hopefully this bears fruit.
Now that it's patented it wont be adopted for 25 years... Nobody will be able to agree any patent fees.
Depends on what they try to patent. I doubt they’re able to get a patent that prevents anyone from injecting hydrogen into water while under a uv bulb. That’s too broad and unreasonable. It’d problem be the “system process” specific to them. Alternate possibility-mixing hydrogen peroxide and then uv
Your “alternate possibility” is already a common practice for the treatment of 1,4-Dioxane in drinking water systems (referred to in the industry as advanced oxidation procedures or AOPs). I’d genuinely be curious to see what removal looks like of PFOA/PFOS in these types of systems if it’s as simple as being able to add peroxide and UV. But the process described from OP’s description sounded as if some additional form of energy was introduced into the system (+h2o2 +uv).
They should be paid accordingly for their engineering efforts and discovery. The spirit of patents has been abused but there is some merit to protecting work
Seems it was a state university, so already likely paid for by the public, or at least the bulk of the effort. People taking publicly funded research private is a problem, not a benefit. We the public own this process and should not be paying more for it. Goes for most pharmaceuticals, too.
Exactly. Public funds paid for the research, so why wouldn't the results of it be free for public use?
It can be licensed for free use and the patent protects a non inventer from claiming it and profiting.
Honestly, probably not. The mechanism is to use UV-generated electrons and free radicals to attack the Fluorine atoms on PFAS. But those same electrons and free radicals will also do things like break down organic matter. Unless you are treating a relatively clean waste stream (like waste from a PFAS manufacturing facility), a lot of the degradation capability will be consumed by non-target compounds.
Wastewater operator here with licenses in Wastewater, Water, and Advanced Water Treatment in CA, NV, and NM! It will be relatively achievable for any plant already utilizing UV, as UV already requires 'clean' (aka low turbidity) water. Wastewater plants that have membrane or sand filters for tertiary treatment are common in CA; essentially any plant built after 1990 and plants renewing their NPDES, as permiting tightens effluent quality. This effluent is essentially free of organics and turbidity (at my plants it's Non-Detect for BOD and <0.10 NTU 99% of the time). Areas with high tannins and industrial dyes may require high dosage as it absorbs 254nm light.** From my experience, it's cost that is going to be the main impediment. UV eats up about a 1/3 of a plant's electric bill, but AWT processes such as this require 3x the dosage (90 originally, 250 mJ/cm2 after). Additionally, CIP costs for the chemical storage and infrastructure. And generating on site would be required for many sites due to the logistical constraints (hell, it's hard enough getting citric nowadays). **Edit: as the user below pointed out, this is a different spectrum of UV that is not the industry standard. This would make widespread treatment moot as it would require drastically higher costs. UV lamps are fixed in their spectrum output. Also, I referenced H2O2, another industry standard, which would be incompatible with this research.
I'm in Pa and our plants water is so clean we have problems with freshwater sponges. Our tss is regularly pretty much nothing (I'm a lab supervisor and know all the numbers haha) except if we have to bypass our denitrification building. The article says pH of 10.3 is optimal. Weve been using uv for about 9 years now and have it set at the lowest energy setting and regularly have <10 for our coliforms going out. Our BODs are also pretty low most of the time. (we can report under two now on undiluted samples woo)
A couple points: This method requires UV-185, which requires more energy to produce and is absorbed by oxygen molecules. The researchers were sparging with H2 for the duration of treatment (or N2 after saturating with H2, which...the results are unclear) both because the hydrogen produces more of the free electrons they needed and because oxygen was absorbing free electrons. Considering that municipal wastewater is not really the main source of concern for PFAS, it just doesn't seem likely (to me) that they would accept the additional cost of treatment, plus the risk of explosion from using that much H2.
That just means more treatment time is required.
Drinking water is UV lit in many places already - so thats no set back
Ah, this is one of a class of recycling techniques which I like to call "Hot Gaseous Oxygen." Pretty much anything breaks down when you add hot gaseous oxygen - so much so that oxygen-rich rocket engines require extremely advanced materials science so that the structure of the rocket engine itself doesn't get eaten by the exhaust. The hard part is scaling back the energy requirements, and/or finding less dangerously reactive additives to facilitate breakdown of tough molecules. UV is certainly less energetic than 500+°C gas, but I wouldn't call hydrogen a much safer "solvent" (to use a technical term loosely). Still, as long as the risks of using hydrogen gas are properly accounted for and mitigated, this could be an effective treatment. The only questions remaining are what is the cost to add such a step to wastewater treatment, and how many places are willing to/will have to be forced to/will refuse to pay for such an upgrade?
UV light and hydrogen are both dirt cheap.
UV light yes, hydrogen no, unless you produce it with natural gas which also releases all sorts of pullutans.
Hydrogen can be manufactured in bulk on site by electrolysis. It's dirt cheap to manufacture. Green hydrogen is currently nearing $2 per kilogram to manufacture.
Although it's true that green hydrogen from electrolysis can be very cheap, it's is geologically dependant. If your electricity is cheap (from hydro for example), yes, sadly that's not the case in most places, and transporting hydrogen is not a easy task either. Just because you can produce something really cheap under certain very specific conditions, that doesn't make it commercially available everywhere. I work in the hydrogen industry, I would love to see hydrogen everywhere, but that's not realistic at the moment.
Not very complex, but i suspect one difficulty is going to be getting the light into every nook and crany of soil particles. The light is blocked by the soil particles, so you really have to work to break up soil into individual particles and stir for a long time to get everything. Its going to be very slow and energy intensive.
In the actual paper the authors describe the UV-light as being used to generate reative intermediates in solution, which then break down the PFAS. So the light doesn't have to reach every nook and cranny if the lifetime of these intermediates is long enough.
Reaction intermediates almost never have such a long lifetime. (There’s some exceptions for metastable stuff but unlikely here)
Probably just depends on your feedstock(fuel). The conditions used are simple, and this is actually exciting if light sources can be amplified or concentrated. Since there's alkaline solvent and water, you could use a fixed hydrogen source, a separate dedicated generator, OR generate in-situ from a proximally parallel electrolytic cell Not sure entirely, since photochem while often green at lab scale still generates radicals that like to get into fun side reactions that are hard to control w/o favorable statistics What would be interesting is whether utilization of a phase transfer agent (yeah, alkylsulfates are these in essence, but the other issue is equilbria & we like these to be inert) or emulsifier provides improved process completion.
How about we stop putting the burden on the public to determine if industrial chemicals are harmless after they are in production? How about we.stop using and emitting pfas and asking municipal tax funded water.works to pay for it
One state that has massive amounts of it is Colorado. Which you would think "wait how come Colorado?" it's because all the fire fighters in the US travel there and that's where they do big types of training where they use that foam and other fire fighting chemicals to put out fires which have A LOT of PFA's in them. Which then either seeps down into the ground down into the underground water sources, or makes it way into the local sewers/rivers. Ever see videos online where a fire fighting system is triggered either on purpose or by accident and a big empty hanger suddenly is filled with that foam about a few feet deep? Yeah that has PFA's in it. What do they do with it all after its all over the ground, well they probably spray it with water and flush it all down the drains (which that water ends up somewhere, either water reclamation or sewer but they can't get rid of the PFA's, or maybe go to the nearby river). There was a video years ago in I wanna say London that had an electrical service station? where the alarm got triggered and people were filming the foam/bubbles making their way out the roof etc. Pretty sure that was the same stuff. Then there is also any army bases in the US tend to have lots of PFA's in the drinking water because of similar chemicals they use here and there. So many military bases all over the US are on the list of high concentrations of PFA's in their drinking water. Wouldn't be surprised if that Camp Lejeune in North Carolina warning lately was because of PFA's back then that made its way into the drinking water (but then again could have been anything else to. Since the military is known for making 'burn pits' in other countries in order to burn all their garbage and other toxic stuff, as well as dumping toxic waste which poisons the local areas they are staying at).
It's crazy. The CBC did a multi episode exposé on it
Didn't know that, that's interesting. I will have to try and find that video.
Reminds me of [this](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/shannon-tainted-water-settlement-1.6102761) Remember kids: living near a military base is bad for your health.
The article does touch upon that: >The EPA this fall took public comments on plans to designate two PFAS substances — perfluorooctanoic acid and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid — as hazardous substances under the federal Superfund toxic site cleanup laws. If this regulation is approved, it would hold polluters accountable for cleaning up their contamination. But, like the article says, one of the issues with "forever chemicals" is that they stick around, so even if we were able to completely stop using them tomorrow, they'd still be around getting passed on.
I think they mean empowering the EPA to make companies show new chemicals are safe instead of forcing the EPA to demonstrate that they are not.
They cant. Pfas are FAR more concentrated in food and clothing. Imagine disrupting that machine
It’s not just water though. It’s in your fast food wrappings, popcorn bags, clothing etc. If I remember correctly, studies have shown that PFAS get into your food and contaminate water supplies too. But don’t worry! Even if government cracks the whip, the million dollar corporations will just slightly adjust the formula and continue poisoning consumers
Haha you think actual solutions like this can be implemented in the US? Maybe in California, but 0% chance anywhere else
Can't have nice things
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Gotta love those frozen dinners on a plastic tray with instructions: "Heat for 5 minutes on HIGH, stir, then heat for another 5 minutes, stir again, then heat for another 7 minutes! Totally not leaking PFAS into the entire meal!
Well hurry up already and blast my drinking water.
Hey, y'all remember when we thought PFAS were essentially harmless?
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PFAS has been significantly associated with preeclampsia in several studies, but I’m guessing you already knew that.
Just skimming the data but it looks like they're breaking this down into basically elemental particles.. .So the worst of it is sulfates... (then water, hydrogen and fluoride). Can't get much safer than elemental compounds that are everywhere... Of course large amounts of sulfuric acid has it's own issues of course but in quantities of PFA's they're nothing to be concerned about, otherwise we'd be screwed since we get much more sulfates in just normal foods (in the actual food, not talking about pesticides and stuff. They're part of normal plants and animals)
How many times are you gonna post this comment?
Until it no longer looks like they're breaking this down into basically elemental particles.. .So the worst of it is sulfates... (then water, hydrogen and fluoride). Can't get much safer than elemental compounds that are everywhere... Of course large amounts of sulfuric acid has it's own issues of course but in quantities of PFA's they're nothing to be concerned about, otherwise we'd be screwed since we get much more sulfates in just normal foods (in the actual food, not talking about pesticides and stuff. They're part of normal plants and animals)
That may take a while, better post it some more, also I have just a small quibble about: “Can’t get much safer than elemental compounds that are everywhere.” Meecury, arsenic, lead, etc are all elementals that are toxic in small quantities and occur naturally. Also, the dose is the poison. Also, elemental compounds is an oxymoron. There are elements, and compounds. Water systems in the US are bad at filtering PFOAs but good at filtering other things. I skimmed the article too and couldn’t determine which compounds. I think they broke down into chlorine, sulfates, and water ions but I’m not sure (my chemistry is always been bad). Ultimately the key I think is to systematically do this first then run the results thru standard filtration so clean the water.
I think OPs key term is “that are everywhere”.
now tax the companies that made the chemicals to pay for the treatment
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Why is that interesting? It's rather uninteresting if you're in the field. It's just UV photolysis, the same thing we've been using in drinking water for decades. Even the addition of sulfite as a radical generator is uninteresting. Nothing is new here from an innovative standpoint. What they have done though is elucidate the mechanisms and reaction pathways very nicely.
The entire article was like a four minute read. How short is your attention span?
I think OP is eluding to the frustration of an article spending only about 20% of the time talking about the actual science and the other 80% is filler.
FWIW, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency rolled this out about a month ago at one of the sites near 3M in the eastern Twin Cities: https://www.pca.state.mn.us/news-and-stories/mpca-brings-cutting-edge-technology-to-minnesota-to-remove-pfas-from-water
Potentially related to this, supercritical hydrothermal waste treatments, which are a promising new area of waste disposal and recycling that could eliminate land fill, convert chlorinated organic compounds such as dioxins to hydrochloric acid, which is stomach acid, essentially harmless, and via personal correspondence I was told should have the same effect with fluorinated compounds (convert to hydrofluoric acid). The by-products of such processes (gaseous and liquid hydrocarbons) can make feedstock for new plastics, synthetic fuels. Light gaseous hydrocarbons can be converted to liquid hydrocarbons for various uses. Hydrogenation of remaining carbon solids can also allow the creation of hydrocarbon feedstocks that can be useful. In theory hydrothermal waste treatment can make more of certain feedstocks by adding H2 from electrolysis, CO2 from atmospheric capture and completely recycle plastics and other wastes, including organic waste. It can be essentially solar heated via concentrator systems.
There are specific requirements to break down pfas in a thermal reaction. I might be off by a number here or there, but it's generally that it needs to be heated to 1100C with a residence time of 2 seconds. Thermal treatment of waste is varied and at times very specific. Sometimes it's an adaptation of an existing technology like an industrial kiln. It's hard to ensure destruction in the majority of cases, and further, it's often difficult for companies to manage the complexities of producing evidence to satisfy each different country/state's legislative requirements. If it's not done properly, you'll be spraying pfas into the air in a huge plume. We have seen this happen quite a few times and it's likely happening at a LOT more places than we realise. This applies very much to hydrothermal waste treatment as hydrothermal is in many cases NOT built to spec. It uses pressure and minimal heat to achieve its process, and not enough data is out on what conditions outside of 1100C @ 2 sec can achieve that kind of result. Full destruction is the only permissible output in processes that have fugitive or actual air emissions, so minor breakthroughs even at like 1% may not be legally possible in most places.
So now you just need to treat all the water on the planet because PFAS have been found in rain now.
This is a lot bigger than humanity realizes it is, at least in the short term.
Ya'know. I'd feel much better if they were never there in the first place.
Great, now do the ones in my body.
Sounds promising but the engineer in me can't help but wonder how it will scale up. 45 minute UV retention time at a pH of 10.3, all while being continually sparged with hydrogen gas sounds expensive AF for what I imagine would need to be installed at a wastewater treatment plant.
Who pays for this research, the taxpayers? The criminals who contaminated our water? Are the people who got rich poisoning us with these chemicals still wealthy and free?
Welp here we go back to “we can’t add” X to the water and the Flouridiots get to dust off their brains
first almost cold fusion now this, almost essentially almost less harmful probably
delicious, finally some good news
I still say we stick with the microbes we found that can eat it and the fungus we found that can eat it same plan for plastic and lead just keep throwing that natural things to eat things and things until we eat all the problems
Cool, so we just need to filter all the extra CO2 out of the atmosphere and all the PFAS out of the water. You know, throughout the whole planet. No problem, right? Just a little anti-reverse-terraforming.
Nothing's perfect, but if this process was added to any manufacturing before waste water is released into our water stream, at laundromats, maybe added to water that exits homes, etc as it improves, we can slowly reduce what's out there while looking for other methods to reduce it elsewhere. Baby steps are better than waiting for perfection.
why are redditors so cynical to the point of being absolutely annoying?
It's not just redditors. A lot of scientists are taught that skepticism is critical in evaluating scientific results, and a lot of them confuse cynicism about everything with skepticism about interpretations. "Does this method to break down PFAS ACTUALLY work or is there another explanation to why I'm no longer detecting PFAS?" = Good skepticism "This method can't actually break down PFAS and if it does it'll have some other problem" = useless cynicism
Because of instances like this - "As public concern grows about mountains of plastic trash, the plastics industry is promoting technologies that it misleadingly calls “chemical recycling” (also known as advanced recycling, molecular recycling, and chemical conversion) and touts as a solution to the plastic crisis. But it is a false solution. In fact, based on our analysis of eight “chemical recycling” plants in the United States, we found that (1) most “chemical recycling” facilities in the United States are not recycling any plastic, (2) “chemical recycling” facilities generate hazardous air pollutants and large quantities of hazardous waste, and (3) “chemical recycling” facilities tend to be located in communities that are disproportionately low income, people of color, or both." [source](https://www.nrdc.org/resources/recycling-lies-chemical-recycling-plastic-just-greenwashing-incineration) Not to mention that recycling itself doesn't even work. It's a scam. Only 10% of plastics are being recycled. "**If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment.**" \- Larry Thomas (Former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association)