Tldr;
In 2022, a team at University of California at Riverside discovered that blasting wastewater with special “short-wave” ultraviolet rays causes PFAS chemical bonds to break down without creating harmful byproducts.
Tell me when they have a way to remove it from my cell supply
donate blood. Firefighters (who train with hazardous PFAS foam/liquids) were shown to have lower levels in their blood stream if they donated blood regularly.
They do leave the body over time, but the half life is very long, like 3-10 years depending on the specific one.
Blood levels of many of them have fallen a lot since the year 2000ish as some were phased out, though of course there’s dangers of more being made.
https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/health-effects/us-population.html
There’s also new rules going in effect 2025 to require them to be removed from tap water if present, using a different process called ion exchange. The method described in the article is a way of destroying them once they’re removed, so a way to treat high pfa level waste basically.
https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/health-effects/us-population.html
Horrible how multiple companies like 3M and Dupont were covering up their dangers for years. $10 billion doesn’t seem like nearly enough in damages.
https://time.com/6289893/3m-forever-chemical-pfas-settlement/
Especially when the costs of keeping it out of affected drinking water systems alone is expected to be $1.5 billion, per year.
Yeah, it absolutely astounds me that they polluted the entire world and poisoned everyone and everything within it, and then the people are footing the bill for trying to cleaning it up. And that’s only our drinking water, not all the plants and animals we eat all the time that have it in them in probably huge amounts. AFAIK there is no plan for that at all so our cells will still be swimming in them.
3M and others should be taken over by the government and turned into nonprofits where 100% of their profit goes to cleaning up the world.
Give blood.
Or plasma which you can donate more often
Or platelets every two weeks, woo!
Does that remove pfas, though?
This is very interesting. Currently, most ion exchange systems that remove PFAS have to dispose of their brine as hazardous waste, which is very costly and doesn’t necessarily destroy PFAS - in Florida, for example, they inject the brine into a deep aquifer.
A lot of novel technologies target PFAS destruction in these concentrated waste streams, but often further concentration is required before you can effectively destroy PFAS with advanced oxidation processes. If they could use low-UV to destroy it without further concentration or additional chemicals (beside the salt already used to regenerate the resin), ion exchange would become a much better solution for treated PFAS contaminated water.