How to destroy “forever chemicals” for good

From 2010 through 2019, researchers tracked all the births in New Hampshire. What they found, published last December, was alarming: families downstream of groundwater sites known to be contaminated with so-called “forever chemicals” saw a threefold increase in low birth weights and deaths among infants, compared to families upstream of the same sites (1).

It’s one of many studies sounding alarms about the serious health risks posed by forever chemicals—the infamous molecules also known as perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). Such findings don’t just make clear the dangers; they also underscore the urgent need for robust, practical, and scalable methods for removing these insidious chemicals.

Most of the roughly 14,000 forever chemicals go unregulated and untreated. Filtering is possible, but even if filters could capture every chemical, the concentrated waste left behind on the filters themselves presents a problem. Tossing highly concentrated PFAS into landfills just prolongs and exacerbates the issue.