If you’ve been following environmental news over the past couple of decades, you’ve probably heard about PFAS – those pesky “forever chemicals” that seem to turn up everywhere from drinking water to polar bear blood. They’re bad for us, and we know it, but they’ve been leeching into the environment for decades, often as a result of military or industrial activity. What’s worse is that these contaminants just don’t seem to break down—they stick around in the environment causing harm on an ongoing basis.
Now, researchers are finally cracking the code on how to deal with these notoriously stubborn molecules. It won’t be easy, but there’s finally some hope in the fight against the bad stuff that doesn’t just wash away.
Do You Really Want To Live Forever?
The term “forever chemicals” is media shorthand for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances—or PFAS for short. These substances earned their nickname from The Washington Post in 2018, and for good reason. These synthetic compounds feature carbon-fluorine bonds. These are some of the strongest chemical bonds found in nature and are very hard to break. This molecular stubbornness is actually a key feature of these chemicals, making them incredibly useful for things like firefighting foams or non-stick cookware—indeed, the remarkably unreactive Teflon was one of the first PFAS materials to come to prominence. However, this very feature also means they accumulate in the environment and in our bodies rather than breaking down naturally.
In practical terms, the strength of the carbon-fluorine bond means that PFAS chemicals are remarkably stable, and can easily resist high temperatures and chemical attack. Thus, they can persist in the environment for thousands of years, contaminating water supplies, accumulating in food chains, and most crucially—causing health issues. Research is ongoing, but PFAS chemicals have already been implicated in potentially causing everything from cancers to hormone disruption and liver damage.
Stop The Spread
Obviously, it’s not desirable to have toxic chemicals building up in the environment. Cleaning up existing contamination is of prime importance, particularly in areas where humans still live and work. Removing these chemicals in drinking water supplies remains challenging, but possible. The techniques are well understood, typically requiring the use of reverse osmosis techniques or lots of activated carbon. But what about all the contaminated human-built infrastructure, like military airfields and the like? Many of these concrete and tarmac structures have been soaking in PFAS chemicals for decades, and pose a continued risk of these substnaces leaking into the environment.
Australian firm AmbioLock has gone with an unconventional approach. Rather than trying to remove PFAS from contaminated concrete at airports and fire training grounds, they’ve developed a sealant to lock the chemicals in place. The idea is that the dangerous chemicals can be sealed to the engineered materials so they don’t leach into the environment or harm anyone using the infrastructure on the regular. The company has developed a silicate-based sealant called AmbioSeal, which penetrates the pores of concrete structures to create an impermeable barrier. In testing, the sealant achieved a 99.2% reduction in PFAS leaching from treated materials. The idea is that built infrastructure can be treated to seal PFAS contamination in place, such that the facilities can still be used safely while minimizing further risk from these deletrious chemicals.
The products could yet find grand markets with governments and private operators around the world. There are a great many PFAS contamination sites that are badly in need of remediation. However, it’s still an imperfect measure—ideally, we wouldn’t be spraying these nasty chemicals all over the place to begin with.
Ultimate Destruction
Government and industry are also keen to find ways to limit or avoid future potential releases, too. Enter a team of researchers from CSIRO and Colorado State University. Using computer simulations rooted in quantum mechanics, they modeled exactly what happens to PFAS molecules during pyrometallurgy. The scenario in question concerned lithium-ion battery recycling via pyrometallurgy—the process of incinerating battery materials to recover the metals inside. The researchers eager to determine what peak incinerator temperatures were necessary to destroy any PFAS component of the recyclable battery material, thus ensuring that it would not be released into the environment during the recycling procedure.
Their findings revealed a critical temperature threshold. At lower temperatures (200 °C to 500 °C), PFAS compounds simply vaporize and enter the gas phase, becoming mobile but otherwise remaining stable. The team found that higher temperatures were needed to get the tough C-F bonds to finally surrender and break apart completely. Modelling for an incinerator’s short two-second retention time for gases, the team determined a temperature of 950 °C was necessary to attain quick destruction. “We identified the intermediate compounds formed, the key barriers in the process, and determined the required temperatures and times to fully break down these chemicals,” noted Dr Jens Blotevogel, a CSIRO researcher involved with the project.
While the research focused on a specific recycling case, it has broader implications. The modelling may guide future work for other scenarios where it’s desirable to create a recycling process or similar in which PFAS materials will be destroyed rather than emitted to the environment. There is a particularly strong focus on how the world will recycle the masses of batteries now floating around the economy, so it will have direct benefits in limiting PFAS emissions in that regard, too.
These breakthroughs represent real progress, but the challenge now is implementation. Governments, industries, and relevant authorities will need to invest in research and techniques like these to develop cost-effective solutions for the thousands of PFAS-emitting and PFAS-contaminated sites worldwide. PFAS destruction represents one of the major mainstream environmental challenges today. As these researchers have shown, with the right analysis and some clever chemistry, “forever” doesn’t necessarily have to mean forever.
Donate blood, by doing so not only are you helping society out but you’re reducing your own PFAS levels.
win win
Very surprised this isn’t mentioned whenever PFAS are discussed.
Aw, now I find out that I’m being selfish when I thought I was being selfless. That reminds me, I’m due for a donation.
Makes sense that, effectively, diluting the blood would reduce the net foreign chemical content. So, bloodletting turns out to not be such a bad idea after all?
Bloodletting is still used for people at risk of iron overload or excessive red blood cells (like haemachromatosis and polycythemia). And I do believe leeches, and maggots are still used too in niche settings!
It does make me wonder what the PFAS levels are in frequent recipients?
Like sickle cell suffers don’t have enough to deal with!
Does that work when the fluids you are drinking to replenish your plasma also contain PFAS?
To an extent, yes. These chemicals accumulate in the body, and aren’t easily removed by it. To get Parts Per Billion in your blood, you only need to be drinking water that contains Parts Per Trillion, and but that’s over a few years. So even if what you drink to replenish your plasma has PFAS, it would take likely a couple months to return to your previous blood levels, and longer if you start taking more active prevention measures.
And donations happen about every 3 months for whole blood, or as often as every every 2 weeks for plasma donation!
These are nasty chemicals, but can we stop using the term “forever” chemicals? Two common forever chemicals that shouldn’t worry you – H20 (water) and Si02 (sand).
It’s forever “chemicals”, not “forever” chemicals. H2O and SiO2 are natural, not chemicals.
And comment box ate my “/sarcasm” tag.
There is no such distinction.
I’m not sure how you can write the chemical formula for something and in the same breath call it “not a chemical”. Do some more thinking on this one.
Comment box ate my < / sarcasm > tag, sorry for confusion.
The context of forever chemicals is that they can be absorbed from food or drink but the human body has no mechanism to remove them. So once they’ll continue to accumulate “forever”. This is definitely not the same thing as H2O, which the body has several ways to expel, or SiO2 which passes through the digestive system basically inert.
I don’t think forever chemicals is a great name, lots of potential to mislead, but please don’t make it worse by equating them to harmless chemicals that don’t break down.
Then lead and mercury are forever chemicals? Both cannot be removed by human body.
Yes they can. You eventually piss out both, and chelation can make it happen faster if you need it.
The reason why they are toxic is because they pass as other metals for your biochemistry, so they’re substituted instead of the proper ones. Lead mimics calcium, iron, and zinc, so it gets embedded in structures that would normally have these metals and it remains there for a very long time, such as getting stuck in your bones. As the body keeps recycling these tissues over time, the lead turns up later and keeps re-poisoning you.
No. Branding is about catchiness, not pedantic correctness
Doesn’t “causing health issues. Research is ongoing, but PFAS chemicals have already been implicated in potentially causing everything from cancers to hormone disruption and liver damage.” mean no known effect? Implicated? Potentially? This is the language of a catastrophist and weaker than a chemtrail study. I’m not saying it isn’t true, but it reads like a British tabloid describing a Bigfoot sighting. It strikes me like the attempted dioxin scare of the 1980’s which had bad science in a half a dozen ways.
The best way to “stem the tide” is to stop using them. Civilization existed before these compounds did, and can easily go on without them. Anything less is just greenwashing.
The last time civilization was without PFAS (Teflon, 1938), civilization consisted of about 2.2 billion people.
Now, civilization consists of about 8.1 billion people.
Are you really sure that 8.1 billion people can easily go without something that enabled it to grow so fast in the first place?
Teflon and similar materials are great, but really not essential to supporting a larger population anywhere, at least as far as I am aware. They are a convenience booster only in that sense -mostly giving small gains in cooking oil consumption and agri-manufactoring tasks that find those magic plastics last longer or do the job slightly more efficiently. We could go without and not suffer on the essential industry and agriculture side much – but I don’t think we really should go without, as it isn’t proper use that is the problem its the lack of cleaning up after ourselves and using them in ways they will easily escape into the rest of the world where you can’t then efficiently clean them up.
Humans behave predictably, and generally speaking, they leave their trash everywhere. It’s much more productive to make that trash harmless than it is to attempt to convince humans to change their behavior.
Teflon is actually quite essential in the chemicals industry because it’s non-reactive, or in the electrical industry because it’s an excellent insulator, and it’s used in all kinds of mechanical applications as low-friction bushings and sliding surfaces. The seals and gaskets in your car are probably made of teflon, and we’ve replaced tar and hemp fibers wrapped around household water pipe threads with teflon tape because it lasts so much longer. It’s even made into implants for humans – think of an artificial hip joint.
It’s not just frying pans and gore-tex clothing.
Also it’s generally not Teflon itself that’s the problem. It’s the related chemicals which were developed for use in it’s manufacture that are both incredibly stable and incredibly pervasive.
I didn’t say it wasn’t very useful in many industries, but on the limited scope of supporting a larger population…
If you want to have an entirely modern life its going to be hard to go without I can agree with entirely, but on the basics required to support the population its really not required (at least not as far as I’m aware).
As those folks needing artificial hips are going to hate not having one, or having something less enduring etc, but it doesn’t kill them, or even remove them from the workforce most of the time. As by the time your joints are ruined enough you really can’t function at all you are probably old enough you are not working anyway, making it bad for that individual but irrelevent for the needs of society in supporting the large population. And they are not dying off much faster if any faster for lack of hip replacement, so the population won’t decrease for it much either – they will just have crappier lives. Which is why I have no trouble with them continuing to be used, just in the right places and with the manufacturing waste streams actually cleaned up!
Yet you fail to recognize the knock-on effects of it. If for example you don’t have teflon available to make pipes and reactor vessels for the chemicals industry, you have to start making entire factories out of glass for the same effect and whoops, suddenly other materials and things start to cost a whole lot more to make. This then feeds back to the cost of making basic chemicals and materials, like producing the glass you need for the reactor vessels.
If you look at things in isolation, you can pull out a single link and say “Oh that wasn’t too bad”, but the society is a feedback loop that’s either going up in a self-accelerating manner, or going down in a self-accelerating manner. Keeping it steady for longer than a couple decades is going to be extremely difficult. If something is going to make it worse, it’s probably going to multiply by a few rounds through the loop to make things a whole lot worse than you thought.
Not at all, though the costs going up is both an economics problem of a self solving sort and largely irrelevant to actual point of supporting the population without the wonders of Teflon type plastics anyway.
To take your example glass in chemical industries instead will have a bit of an initial cost uptick, but largely because glass blowers etc have been going out of business without replacements as plastic is so ‘cheap’n’easy’ – so its hard to find the capacity of suitably skilled labour and facitlities to rapidly shift over. (The same problem seen in trying to produce ammo in Europe for Ukraine – the production lines and people have atrophied, and that takes time to recover).
But the actual raw materials of glass are pretty cheap, the energy and time involved in glass vs those fancy C-F polymer actually not that incomparable (if you bother to clean up the toxic waste from the Teflon(etc) materials rather than just dump it…). So in terms of big picture impact to society doing away with it matters not very much. The folks that will be most impacted are the researchers not the established industries – as those are the folks that want to try novel stuff for which the easier and lower skilled to work plastics are really wonderful. The existing industry on the other hand will just pass that tiny increase in their costs along, if there is an increase in costs at all in the end, as the ability to produce their product really doesn’t change meaningfully.
Some things there are knock on effects if you remove them that just couldn’t be worked around practically for society at large but in Teflon type plastic case you can just drop back to an older technology or two that actually did the essential jobs just fine but was slightly less convenient.
You’re assuming that things like glass blowing is just initially more expensive until you’ve got the process down, but in fact it is more expensive overall because it’s more energy, labor, and materials intensive, which is the reason why teflon replaced these technologies in the first place. It was orders of magnitude better on all accounts.
Without teflot, you have either extremely expensive tech like glass, or alternatives that were somewhat cheap to manufacture but did not last in use (like stainless steel piping) that might not be suitable in the first place.
It’s not irrelevant to the point of supporting the population because the cost of supplying your basic material needs is ESSENTIAL in supporting the population. If the cost of maintaining the living standards falls below a certain level, you’ll see people falling back to previous modes of operation like subsistence farming, at which point they’ll either die or revolt against your attempts to keep order, and your society falls apart, and then you’ll have NO chemical processing plants or the rest.
Point being that we now have 3x the number of people to sustain compared to the pre-teflon era of technology. If we had to revert anywhere near to that level of process efficiency, we would see civil wars all over the place.
You do realize that Teflon used in cookware is a small percentage of Teflon usage? It’s got countless uses in medical manufacturing, etc.
About half the teflon produced is going towards the electrical industry, where it makes things like insulators for wires, tools for making semiconductors, and things like coatings on solar panels or the surface coating of the monitor you’re probably looking through right now.
Teflon is responsible for the birth of 5.9 billion people? Do I owe my life to a budget frying pan? If my parents had learned to season cast iron, would I never have been born?
You’re ridiculous, man.
You? Probably not. And not Teflon specifically. But large gluts of new population in certain parts of the world are absolutely reliant on recent technologies, or even if not strictly reliant on them, their momentum makes it extremely difficult to change course.
Isn’t this a bad thing and shouldn’t we stop enabling it? Resting our basic survival on an increasingly-complex technological house of cards seems like a bad idea. It’s like getting everyone addicted to drugs at birth.
It’s already happened. 80% of the humanity would starve to death if we stopped making artificial nitrogen fertilizers for some reason.
Not really true, at least if you actually have a little warning to start a repair of the soil health and alter your farming practices to keep it healthy – artificial fertilizers have allowed and even encouraged completely unsustainable farming practices, as it was so so profitable in those early days to squeeze all that rapid growth and life out of the soil in the short term. But now with the soil so ruined by this intensive agriculture it really doesn’t work out so well – even in pretty poor soil that hasn’t had time to fully recover folks are getting good yields compared to their artificial fertiliser runs without using it by going back to older farming methods to some extent, and co-croping etc – actually using and supporting the natural processes just works, and keeps on working…
“Trying to feed the world with the mainly-organic food yields of 1960 would mean farming twice as much land as we do today under conventional agriculture”
https://www.irishtimes.com/science/2022/09/01/the-big-problem-with-organic-farming-is-it-cannot-produce-enough-food-to-feed-the-worlds-population/
The problem remains that farming is depleting soils regardless, because you’re taking food out of the ground. The minerals and other chemicals need to be replaced, and organic farming does not replace them fast enough to maintain the intensive farming practices we have. Returning back to pre-green-revolution farming would mean expanding food production to ALL the land we could possibly cultivate and destroying whatever natural environments we have left.
Also, organic farming replaces synthetic fertilizers with mineral (mined) fertilizers, because simple crop rotation and tilling practices do not recover the minerals lost to extraction and erosion. Instead of fertilizing with the target chemicals produced for the purpose synthetically, you fertilize with some naturally occurring mineral that has those chemicals in it, that has been mined from somewhere and shipped half-way across the world in some cases.
So, ditch industrial synthetic fertilizers, welcome back Guano Islands.
I didn’t say anything about going backwards, its rather more going forwards than backwards as the abuse of the soil for so many decades means actually the first year or two going back to putting some work into soil health and more nature friendly farming hurts the yield, but a few years after that lots of folks are finding they are getting better yields than they could spraying all the time! As once the soil is destroyed you just need that fertiliser, often in every increasing quantities to actually get a yield…
Also not really true – some plants fix x and consume y etc, which is where things like rotations and co-croping so you have a plant that actually puts back into the soil what the other plant needs can really cut down or eliminate the fertiliser and get you good yields (just of two crops with less tonnange individually but more combined than the mono field would). The soil composition is absolutely important and usually changed by the plant growing in it, but you don’t have to keep planting in that same spot year on year a crop that demands the same elements, bit of science applied to picking the right plants for the right time and place…
So yes the price of crop and yield of better actually something like sustainable farming is different, and obviously not everywhere has so thoroughly killed off their soil to see the yields actually start to go up with more organic farming in only few years as the soil’s initial recovery spike from basically inert to bruised is so much more dramatic than going from just slightly abused to healthy. But can you go without spraying huge quantities of artificial fertiliser and feed everyone, almost certainly with a good margin to spare. And that is without even trying to deal with the mountain of food waste, that globally seems to amount to more than is actually consumed… What you might not be able to do is feed the American’s or increasingly European’s the diet they demand – they won’t starve though.
This is going to be a very pressing question eventually and you will not like whatever the answer is (it has to do with the fact that we are over our carrying capacity already and borrowing resources against our own future, but no matter how many billions of people exist the moral consensus is that John Malthus can never ever ever never ever never be correct… so we persist.)
It’s a shame, because if we started talking about ethical de-growth now, we could avoid having nature force unethical de-growth on us later. But everyone always wants the line to go up, and talking about population reduction is allegedly “very icky” and makes you “basically Hitler”, even if you’re just saying “maybe people should choose to have fewer kids”.
Now it’s just a matter of time before someone chimes in talking about how we could turn Texas into a sardine can and pack everyone on earth into it. It’s all so tiresome.
“Ethical de-growth” is simply a byword for grabbing social power and keeping it. There’s nothing ethical about it – see: China.
Maybe people should choose to have fewer children, but the emphasis should be on the word choose . Trouble is, people won’t make that choice unless they’re being bullied by a big autocratic government that has the power to punish people for not making the “right choices” – and having that power, the government is destined to fall into corruption because it cannot be kept in check by the public. Corruption in turn changes the meaning of “de-growth” into “ethnic cleansing”.
The main issue is that people should have an equal chance to procreate, so the society doesn’t turn into dynasties where only the elite have the permission to have children – because they’re in control – while the lower classes are eliminated.
It’s also a paradox if people do it voluntarily, because those who would voluntarily not procreate would be replaced by people who would not make the same choice – by natural selection or survival of the ones who breed faster. The future would consist of weird religious sects that shun contraceptives and people with the compulsive need to have children otherwise.
@Dude
Choices can be engineered, as we see daily in our media. Create a culture and create the counter-culture too, so long as both fit within your paradigm. Force is actually a pretty inefficient way of accomplishing things. Just frame reproduction as something that poor people do (for audiences on the right) or as something that religious zealots do (for audiences on the left). Have the centrist talk show hosts bring up “reproduction in moderation”. It’ll only be weird for a week before people internalize it.
But unless your engineer has absolute power to shut out other opinions, the opposition can arise to do counter-engineering and split your society into competing factions that believe in different things. Then your “limit growth” social engineers are met with “drill baby drill” social engineers.
That reveals more about your attitudes on the people of the right. They’re not “vain billionaires”, but people who want to look after their own and prioritize their own families, communities and nations, first. Reproduction in that context is having more of your people and less of other people competing for the same resources, which is why your idea of “only poor people breed” would land badly. They’d see right through it.
What Malthus describes is fitting to a subsistence level society where the number of people you have translates directly to your productivity. In the sense that producing more people captures a greater portion of the available productive value – leading to a tragedy of the commons situation where everybody’s just trying to push out more babies to have more workers, leading to overpopulation and poverty for all.
This case is “solved” by modernizing the society to the point that you need more than your arms and legs and a plot of land to survive. In fact you need to make it so people have to live on rent all the time, in some form or another, so they have to earn money or get kicked to the curb. Then, you need to place some artificial barriers on how much anyone is allowed to earn to keep them just on that limit of “Shall I have a child or a life?”.
Malthus is defeated essentially by changing the definition of “poverty” from absolute poverty to relative poverty, and making it so that if you can’t reach a certain minimum level, you effectively cannot survive at all or lose your agency and fall under the guardianship of the state. People are still going to “eat themselves to the point of poverty” as Malthus predicted – it’s just a slightly more comfortable poverty than being at the direct risk of dying.
There is absolutely no way that spraying the concrete prevents PFAS contamination. Take one look at how firefighting foams are deployed and this will be extremely obvious. It flows way over concreted areas! It will find its way to the soil!
Be very very very skeptical of Australian companies dealing with a problem the Australian government wants to go away. They have a habit of hyping the shit out of projects that claim to solve their inconvenient truths, going “See? Our plucky homegrown privatized scientists already have a solution!”, and then that solution either completely fails or is never rolled out in the first place. They exist only to be a soundbite.
Those chemicals are easily decomposed to basic elements in a reactor with high neutron flux (something like RBMK or early VVER are the best)
The only issue is people in the west got brainfarted into thinking that anything containing the word “nuclear” is exploding horrible death to all the ducks, rabbits and deer wandering their local park.
If we could make everyone build simple research-grade reactor in their backyard many people would be forced to understand that their radiophobia is irrational, but I doubt it would happen unless it’s enforced by army and police.
Or we could just dump the PFAS into cement kilns, like we do with all sorts of other nasties that nobody wants to touch. Since we already have those, and all.
Except we’d rather just dump them into the nearby waterways instead of sealing them up. It’s more profitable for the chemical companies, after all, and isn’t that the most important thing? /s
Some other options for permanent destruction: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-most-promising-ways-to-destroy-forever-chemicals/ar-AA1EGr8V
How are they “bad for us”? I have missed something. Are they forever because they do not decompose, meaning don’t react? If they don’t react how can they have an effect? Do they just clog us up? The they get inside of cells? If so, how could they do that?
If they don’t get inside cells and they don’t react, do they behave like an ion and affect reactions more like a catalyst?
Curious people want to know.
refer to section “The Human Impact” here:
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/22/pfas-the-organofluorines-your-biochemist-warned-you-about/
Thanks, I’ll have to check for recent results. I had thought that “PFAS” was an acronym for the micro/nano plastics we hear so much about. I can see how a surfactant can easily percolate throughout the system. I don’t see any evidence of health effects.
The story has the ubiquitous “may” do such and such one sees instead of “no connection found”. “they may have endocrine-disrupting effects”. In this age where 80% of scientific papers can not be repeated successfully I usually wait for large meta-studies or at least several independent findings. But as of the 2021 article even the meta-studies produce a null result. Where’s the beef?
“80% of scientific papers can not be repeated successfully” [citation needed].
(Not weighing in on the PFAS issue at all, don’t know enough about it.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Most_Published_Research_Findings_Are_False
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42QuXLucH3Q
Having (tried) taught physics to pre-med and bio students I can say that math skills are not great and by far most of them who get involved in research will drop their data into a stats package that may or may not apply or be used correctly.
See: replication crisis. It mostly affects the “soft sciences” though, social sciences, psychology, economics, etc. but the hard sciences are affected as well. Medical science is a bit of a mixed bag.
The main problem though is that people simply don’t attempt to replicate research, or if they do they don’t publish the results, or even contact the original authors to question their research, because of the culture of “publish or perish” that favors novel claims at the expense of debunking bad science and pure nonsense.
Wikipedia:
“A 2016 survey by Nature on 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility found that more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiment results (including 87% of chemists, 77% of biologists, 69% of physicists and engineers, 67% of medical researchers, 64% of earth and environmental scientists, and 62% of all others), and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. But fewer than 20% had been contacted by another researcher unable to reproduce their work. ”
Now, failing to reproduce an experiment doesn’t directly mean it can not be replicated. The issue is that having such a high percentage of failure yet no fallout from it means that the peer review process is working pretty poorly. Bad science gets passed along simply because it’s too intimidating to challenge, or because there’s no funding for publishing null results.
For the point of it, if you think about how people earn the title of a PhD, you have to publish a number of articles to be included in your thesis, unless you’re doing a monograph which requires a whole lot more work and more focus in your work.
A PhD is basically like a driver’s license to scientific research – it doesn’t mean you’ve done something special – it’s just a proof that you can do serious research with the best of them. That in turn means that millions of people are cranking out research papers out of obligation rather than genuine interest or care, which is a part of the “publish or perish” problem. Proper science is being swamped by a system that uses publishing as a metric to gauge competence, which causes people to game publishing metrics, which corrupts the science itself.
To make the main point: scientific research isn’t invalid but it has gotten very noisy in recent times. Whatever interesting results you find, you got to wait 5-15 years to confirm or see if it just falls off of the radar as a fluke, or gets debunked in meta-research.
This point is abused by both sides for or against, one using the uncertainty to argue that there is no harm because we don’t know for sure, and the other to argue that there definitely is and it’s just being suppressed. One side is using it to hide their crimes and the other side is using it to gain sensationalism, moral panic, and social power by exaggerating problems and using them to demand a public mandate to action.
There is also a problem of diminishing returns. As the unsolved problems or unanswered question get tougher and more obscure, the measurement problems have become more difficult. The use of statistics is more and more important and also more and more prone to error. A null result is always worth publishing but I don’t know if those papers make it to print anymore.
Veritasium to the rescue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC2eSujzrUY
Veritasium has an hour-long video about it.
I usually don’t watch Derek Muller’s Veritasium (subscribed but dropped out… padded too much to my tastes among other reasons) but today of all days I finally knew what PFOAS are watching it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC2eSujzrUY&t=2276s&pp=ygUUdmVyaXRhc2l1bSBjaGVtaWNhbHM%3D
“(…)the sealant achieved a 99.2% reduction in PFAS leaching from treated materials”:
So it stills release 0.8%, which means it will keep release PFAS, just much more slowly, but at the end it will release them. So for infrastructures supposed to be used for decades, contained PFAS will more or less finally be fully released.
Also, when infrastructures are modified, rebuilt or simply demolished, the sealant still containing PFAS will be simply dumped somewhere, fractionned in pieces with more exposed surface, so more releases.
And since this sealant is made of chemicals with weaker bonds than carbon-fluorine ones, it certainly means that it will degrade more or less quickly, and will let PFAS leaking.
No to mention wear and erosion of surface…
So i really don’t see this as a solution, just a delay before PFAS being finally released…
It might keep leeching, or it might actually seal up well enough that after a decade or 4 leeching at very low rates though the small flaws the rest is just too well contained to ever get out. Either way its a solid short term win, and potentially quite a good long term solution as many of these highly contaminated places like military airfields are likely to remain military airfields for a very very very long time to come – maybe in 50 years time its a space capable drone swarm and controller rather than the next reincarnation of a B-52’s but that same runway resurfaced and retreated to keep the nasty stuff locked up inside a few times over those decades.