PFAS, Forever No More

Michigan officials have identified more than 230 sites with levels above the EPA's health limit for groundwater. But they estimate that number could be well over 11,000. Nationally, the EPA believes there may be 120,000 sites where people were exposed to the forever chemical, including hundreds of military bases.

Now, University of Michigan researchers, led by professor John Foster, are working to remove the “forever” label from PFAS chemicals. They have developed a “cold plasma” technology that breaks the molecules down to harmless elements.

It may be a game changer for the environment and people, especially because PFAS chemicals have been working their way into our environment, bodies and lives since the 1940s. And new chemicals with uncertain long-term impacts continue to arrive.

Read our feature story:
"Unbreakable Bonds"

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[kakashi_senpai]

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[templetonbob]

We need to get rid of PFAS out of our products.

[ruslbicycle]

Wow, that looks energy intensive. Maybe we should stop making PFAS to begin with? Scary.

I could go along the shoreline, scoop up the foam, feed it through a plasma? Then I got a bunch of florinated water and all the other constituents of the chemical?

I hope this can scale and be more practical than it looks like in this video. Why is it just a small university team working on this? I thought the USA had a Trillion dollar military budget. What could be more important to safety/defence than not poisoning our drinking water?

[Surrealitivity]

Yeah! Plasma cleaning. How long until it's installed into municipal water facilities?