Startups Race to Kill ‘Forever Chemicals’

New regulations ramp up market for technologies to destroy PFAS

LAKE ELMO, Minn.—The EPA says that developing technologies to remove PFAS from the environment is a priority for the agency, and that it plans to conduct field studies with companies and states to evaluate different systems. 

Dozens of startups and researchers are studying PFAS-destroying technologies, nearly all still in the laboratory phase and not proven or ready to be scaled up.

But in a boxy building along a commercial stretch in Grand Rapids, Mich., the first commercial-scale operation in the U.S. began destroying PFAS earlier this month.

Run by Revive Environmental, the system is a variation on an existing technology known as supercritical water oxidation.

The technology being used by Revive was developed by Battelle Memorial Institute, a nonprofit research corporation in Ohio, and it is housed in a wastewater treatment facility owned by Heritage-Crystal Clean.

Revive’s first application is treating landfill leachate, or water contaminated from a landfill. Inside the warehouse like facility, 100,000 gallons of leachate containing PFAS is concentrated into 100 gallons of liquid the color of molasses every 18 hours.

The soupy concentrate is then pumped into the aptly named PFAS Annihilator, where high temperatures and pressure force it into a phase where it is neither a liquid nor a gas. In less than 30 seconds, the PFAS molecules are broken apart. Clear water flows out containing inert salts and fluoride.

“We are undoing a very elegantly designed molecule,” said David Trueba, president and CEO of Revive. “We take it to a state that’s healthy and safe through mineralization.”

Mr. Trueba stepped into the trailer-size PFAS Annihilator, which contains heavily insulated piping where the reaction takes place. One section remains covered. “This box here I can’t talk about,” he said. “It’s proprietary trade secrets.”

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