An Australian-led team of international scientists have shown how toxic “forever chemicals” can be safely destroyed.
CSIRO Environmental Chemist Wenchao Lu said the study was the first to trace the entire chain of chemical reactions as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) break down during incineration.
Dr Lu, the study’s co-author, said global concern around PFAS contamination was mounting because these “forever chemicals” persisted and accumulated in the environment, causing significant harm to human and animal health.
He said there was currently a moratorium on burning PFAS in the United States, and regulatory uncertainty elsewhere.
“This is because improper incineration does not completely destroy them, and risks spreading them further through the air. It also creates harmful greenhouse gas emissions.”
Dr Lu said the team of researchers from the CSIRO, the University of Newcastle, Colorado State University and the National Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory in Hefei, China, had defined a pathway for PFAS to be destroyed safely and completely, inside a hazardous waste incinerator.
“There are over 15,000 types of PFAS, but all of them share a strong fluorocarbon chain which doesn’t break down naturally,” he said.
“This is what makes them so persistent in our environments.”
He said some of the chemicals formed during PFAS incineration exist for just 1 millisecond, but identifying these intermediary molecules was crucial to determining what harmful products were formed throughout the process.
“By taking ‘snapshots’ of the chemical reactions as they occur, we can see what intermediaries or harmful free radicals form inside the incinerator,” Dr Lu said.
“These chemicals had been hypothesised, but never actually detected.”
Read the full study: Direct measurement of fluorocarbon radicals in the thermal destruction of perfluorohexanoic acid using photoionization mass spectrometry.
