Read the full article by Sydney Smith (C&EN)
“Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), known as forever chemicals, were once prized for the strength of their carbon-fluorine bonds. But now a ubiquitous health concern, the tough molecules have made their way into groundwater, soil, and humans across the globe. Six of them have been under the US Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation: perfluorobutanesulfonic acid (PFBS), perfluorohexanesulfonic acid (PFHxS), perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS), perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA), and the ammonium salt of hexafluoropropylene oxide dimer acid (HFPO-DA, commonly known as GenX).
Current PFAS filtration systems typically sequester the molecules from water, but the resulting secondary waste must still be dealt with. A newly developed catalytic membrane goes beyond filtration. It defuses the six substances by harnessing the power of hydrogen atoms activated by palladium. By breaking C–F bonds in PFAS molecules and replacing the tightly bound fluorine atoms, the reactive hydrogen renders the PFAS harmless (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 2026, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2613985123).
‘The sexy thing about the paper,’ says Bruce Rittmann, an environmental engineer at Arizona State University, who led the work, ‘is that our system worked on all of the six regulated PFAS molecules. And they have different structures and functional groups on them.'”…