PFAS are among the more dispiriting achievements of 20th century chemistry. Invented in the 1940s and deployed across Teflon pans, waterproof clothing, and food packaging, they were celebrated for resisting heat, grease, and water. The problem, which took several decades to appreciate, is that they resist breaking down in the environment with exactly the same enthusiasm. They are now detectable across the globe in water, soil, air and 99% of humans, whilst being linked to liver damage, reproductive disorders and cancers. Thanks DuPont.
Current removal methods get the chemicals to stick to materials like activated carbon, but are slow, inefficient, and generate contaminated waste that still needs to go somewhere. Now though, a research team at Rice University has developed a layered double hydroxide material made from copper and aluminium whose internal structure removes PFAS molecules over 1,000 times more effectively than existing materials, and roughly 100 times faster than commercial carbon filters.
Researcher and excellently named Phelecia Scotland hard at work
🧐 What's in it for me? PFAS contamination is already a regulatory crisis in the US, Europe, and Australia, and treatment infrastructure is years behind where it needs to be. A material that works this fast and this effectively in continuous-flow setups could realistically end up in municipal water systems.
💵 Out of the Lab: PFAS remediation is about to become a very large industry whether it wants to or not. Regulatory pressure in the US and EU is forcing utilities and manufacturers to act, and the existing tech is inadequate.
Researcher Youngkun Chung is now a fellow at Rice's WaTER Institute, which is explicitly focused on commercialising water technology research. The institutional scaffolding for a spinout is already in place.
Evocra is an early-stage startup developing electrochemical PFAS destruction technology and is the most direct commercial analogue to what the Rice team has built.
Until next time.
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