1. Invent fantastic new material that does a heretofore novel reaction or one with improved performance (chemical, photovoltaic, etc.)
2. Do #1 without lead, cadmium, mercury, or arsenic.
SociallyAwesomeAwkwardPenguinMeme("Turns PFAS to fluoride", "Contains Cadmium")
momoschili•1h ago
3. Do #2 without platinum, palladium, rhodium, ruthenium to make it economically viable
3eb7988a1663•1h ago
Is that much of a problem for a catalyst? Presumably you do not need many of these: at water treatment plants and at the waste-stream for manufacturing processes which emit PFAS. You might not be able to justify the expense inside your home water purification system, but it could still be cost effective for large scale installations.
momoschili•3m ago
it depends on the scale and the required amounts. If having a limited amount of catalyst wasn't such a big problem I suspect hydrogen power would have been much more economically viable.
SoftTalker•1h ago
Activated carbon filtering removes up to about 75% of PFAS. Reverse-osmosis removes almost all.
Doesn't get rid of them, to be clear. It would still be better if a way could be found to chemically (and cheaply) convert them to something less harmful.
N2yhWNXQN3k9•42m ago
> Activated carbon filtering removes up to about 75%
Seems like the limitation must be more than reducing concentrations in fluid? Otherwise you'd just do multiple passes?
BugsJustFindMe•34m ago
> Activated carbon filtering removes up to about 75% of PFAS
Common inexpensive non-RO filter systems come with independent test results showing 99% removal of PFOA/PFOS (see e.g https://www.brondell.com/content/UC300_Coral_PDS.pdf). Do we have reason to believe that other PFAS don't filter as easily?
momoschili•5m ago
Yes, the key here is the degradation of the forever chemical, not the removal. Removal itself doesn't really change the environmental scale of it
KennyBlanken•22m ago
Alternative path, like with General Electric:
Invent seemingly fantastic new material. Discover it is harmful to humans and wildlife, accumulates in groundwater, etc. Bury that discovery.
Get caught after decades of wild profits, the occasional secret settlement, and spend a decade more fighting legal action before finally running out of appeals or the writing is on the wall, and accept it and pay out.
Start selling water filtration systems, thus profiting off people dealing with your pollution.
This is what I find so frustrating about "the fight against cancer." I'm convinced cancer is so prevalent because corporations are poisoning the shit out of our environment, and thus our water supply, our food, our air. Because we're not equipped with timestamping chemical detection systems, it's difficult to identify the exposure that caused it or increased the person's risk, so industry gets a "freebie" death nobody can pin to them. As long as the chemical isn't toxic enough to be obvious - the companies get away scott free, despite an extensive history of the chemical industry time and time again coming up with some major novel chemical that comes to be used all over society and turns out to be toxic.
Bill Moyers once submitted his blood to a lab and asked them to test for everything they could identify in terms of industrial chemicals, pesticides, etc. The blood was a veritable toxic soup (and some of the control sample containers were contaminated from the supplier, showing how pervasive the toxins are): https://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/problem/popup_bb_02.html
You don't "fight cancer" doing walks and charity balls and cute-kid-starts-fundraiser-because-friend-dies-from-leukemia. You fight cancer by addressing the toxins being pumped into us in the name of profit and "bettering society", allowed to get away with it because of how difficult it is to show any particular chemical directly caused the cancer.
nraynaud•38m ago
I'm a bit confused, are they suggesting that a cadnium coumpound to treat PFAS is a done deal?
nick238•1h ago
1. Invent fantastic new material that does a heretofore novel reaction or one with improved performance (chemical, photovoltaic, etc.)
2. Do #1 without lead, cadmium, mercury, or arsenic.
SociallyAwesomeAwkwardPenguinMeme("Turns PFAS to fluoride", "Contains Cadmium")
momoschili•1h ago
3eb7988a1663•1h ago
momoschili•3m ago
SoftTalker•1h ago
Doesn't get rid of them, to be clear. It would still be better if a way could be found to chemically (and cheaply) convert them to something less harmful.
N2yhWNXQN3k9•42m ago
Seems like the limitation must be more than reducing concentrations in fluid? Otherwise you'd just do multiple passes?
BugsJustFindMe•34m ago
Common inexpensive non-RO filter systems come with independent test results showing 99% removal of PFOA/PFOS (see e.g https://www.brondell.com/content/UC300_Coral_PDS.pdf). Do we have reason to believe that other PFAS don't filter as easily?
momoschili•5m ago
KennyBlanken•22m ago
Invent seemingly fantastic new material. Discover it is harmful to humans and wildlife, accumulates in groundwater, etc. Bury that discovery.
Get caught after decades of wild profits, the occasional secret settlement, and spend a decade more fighting legal action before finally running out of appeals or the writing is on the wall, and accept it and pay out.
Start selling water filtration systems, thus profiting off people dealing with your pollution.
This is what I find so frustrating about "the fight against cancer." I'm convinced cancer is so prevalent because corporations are poisoning the shit out of our environment, and thus our water supply, our food, our air. Because we're not equipped with timestamping chemical detection systems, it's difficult to identify the exposure that caused it or increased the person's risk, so industry gets a "freebie" death nobody can pin to them. As long as the chemical isn't toxic enough to be obvious - the companies get away scott free, despite an extensive history of the chemical industry time and time again coming up with some major novel chemical that comes to be used all over society and turns out to be toxic.
Bill Moyers once submitted his blood to a lab and asked them to test for everything they could identify in terms of industrial chemicals, pesticides, etc. The blood was a veritable toxic soup (and some of the control sample containers were contaminated from the supplier, showing how pervasive the toxins are): https://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/problem/popup_bb_02.html
You don't "fight cancer" doing walks and charity balls and cute-kid-starts-fundraiser-because-friend-dies-from-leukemia. You fight cancer by addressing the toxins being pumped into us in the name of profit and "bettering society", allowed to get away with it because of how difficult it is to show any particular chemical directly caused the cancer.