How to take ‘forever’ out of forever chemicals

Reverendender , 6 months ago

“There are new ones being put on the market each year,” says Timothy Strathmann, a civil and environmental engineer at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden.

Any chance we could, you know, stop doing this immediately?

Synthead , 6 months ago

With plasma.

Saved you a click. The article is still good, though.

Plopp , 6 months ago

Cool! We all have plasma in our bodies so PFAS isn’t a problem then.

photonic_sorcerer , 6 months ago

Not that kind of plasma.

MonkderZweite , 6 months ago

So, burning it?

Weren’t there some plastic eating bacteria too?.

girsaysdoom , 6 months ago

It seems like they are still researching the actual effect but it’s sounds more that it’s breaking the chemical bonds apart by using electrical energy on concentrated areas of the chemical. My hypothesis is that it’s like how electrolysis breaks the bonds between hydrogen and oxygen in water.

d3Xt3r , 6 months ago

This sounds promising. Wish we could do something about microplastics as well.

vivadanang , 6 months ago

we’re going to have to filter the entire ocean to capture these shits as well as the plastic. or release shit tons of bioengineered things to eat the shit, which is another fun game of wreck-entire-ecosystems-roulette.

tuxtey , 6 months ago

On today’s episode of “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?”

Colorcodedresistor , 6 months ago

it’s like how they finally figured out who mr Swirl was…seems like plasma and pfas woulda been tested long ago but, hey, steps forward are to be rewarded.

girsaysdoom , 6 months ago

I think the key is using argon bubbles as a method of nucleation for the PFAS as well as an efficient medium for the plasma to be carried to the chemical. I’d imagine it would function like a neon light with water and a bubbler in it.

Making something like this likely wouldn’t have been high on the list of first things to try, especially when applying it to an entire world of contaminated water.