Read the full article by Britt E. Erickson (C&EN)
“Scientists once wrongly assumed that the carbon-fluorine bond was almost impossible to break. And that meant there was no practical way to completely destroy per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).
‘They were truly thought to be “forever chemicals,”‘ says Julie Bliss Mullen, who began investigating technologies for removing PFAS from drinking water as an undergraduate in 2010. At the time, ‘destruction was not really on the table,’ she recalls.
But Mullen was obsessed with breaking the carbon-fluorine bond. PFAS can be removed from water, but they just get transferred to another medium and eventually make their way back into the environment, she says. To stop that cycle, you have to destroy the molecules by breaking the ‘unbreakable’ bond.
Around 2014, as a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Mullen got her hands on some electrodes and, as she puts it, ‘started playing around with electrochemical oxidation in the lab.’ The process creates hydroxyl radicals and, unlike other advanced oxidation techniques, facilitates the direct transfer of electrons. ‘Those electrons will almost immediately break the carbon-fluorine bond if we’re able to get PFAS onto the anode surface,’ she says.” …