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5 startups fighting 'forever chemicals'

It's generations too late to keep toxic PFAS compounds out of the environment. Does that make a forever market for companies that 'destroy' forever chemicals? Read More

(Updated on July 24, 2024)
Revive Environmental's PFAS Annihilator technology fits into a shipping container.

Revive Environmental's PFAS Annihilator technology fits into a shipping container.

Like other toxic nightmares that inspire public outrage and regulation, “forever chemicals” pose business opportunities. Startups are rushing to market to clean up compounds known as PFAS, which appear in nearly every body and ecosystem where they’ve been measured. These per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, pervading products in most corners of your home and possibly contaminating 57,000 sites in the United States alone, are tied to cancers, infertility and learning disabilities. 

Regulations are ramping up. In October, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a rule requiring companies to report when they release even small concentrations of PFAS into the environment. In the spring the EPA proposed standards to track a handful of the compounds in drinking water. Anti-PFAS policies are on the books in 25 states, and the European Union is considering PFAS restrictions.

What gets rid of chemicals that seem to be poisoning everything, everywhere, all at once? 

Established remediation businesses already remove PFAS from contaminated ground and water at industrial and military sites and water treatment plants. However, they then incinerate or contain and landfill the PFAS, which only moves the problem around.

A new crop of companies focuses on destroying the chemicals by unzipping the tight carbon and flourine bonds that empower PFAS with water-, grease- and fire-resistant properties. Here’s a closer look at the startups.

Revive Environmental

The challenge: Removing PFAS from water and landfill sludge is one challenge. Destroying it is another. Columbus, Ohio, startup Revive Environmental says it’s doing both at scale for all types of PFAS compounds.

The pitch: Revive says that its technology is already performing at a commercial level beyond lab and pilot tests, destroying 99.99 percent of short- and long-chain PFAS, not just the handful the EPA is beginning to regulate. Its. patented, mobile PFAS Annihilators use supercritical water oxidation (SCWO) to reduce the forever chemicals to levels that meet the EPA’s standards for safe drinking water.  TK running in continuous operation

Headwinds: After research nonprofit Batelle succeeded in a 2022 trial in Grand Rapids, Michigan, it spun off Revive Environmental in January with Viking Global Investors. Revive CEO David Prueba, formerly of Evoqua Water Technologies, calls the company “comfortably capitalized” without sharing specifics. Revive is on track to ship six more PFAS Annihilator units by January and have 50 operating by 2025, meeting its projections for the next five years, he said.

What’s unique: Revive is not the only company cleaving the carbon and fluorine atoms in PFAS with technology in mobile units, but it appears early in reaching commercial scale and managing a broad swath of the compounds.

Aclarity

The challenge: Half of all PFAS are found in landfills, according to Aclarity. Rain washes the chemicals back into the environment, where they’re absorbed into the water cycle and ultimately our bodies. 

The pitch: “We pass concentrated PFAS streams, like raw landfill leachate, through our system and destroy PFAS compounds to greater than 99 percent.” Aclarity seeks to treat water in bulk at the source, including at landfills and water treatment plants, through electrochemical oxidation.

Headwinds: Earlier this year in a pilot sponsored by Xylem, Aclarity said its mobile trailer removed 99 percent of PFOS, a subgroup of PFAS, running for four weeks. The company is planning several permanent sites. CEO Julie Bliss Mullen spun off Aclarity in 2017 from a PhD project at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Growing to 21 employees, the Mansfield, Massachusetts, company has raised $17.4 million in seed and venture financing. It won Imagine H2O’s Urban Water Challenge last year.

What’s unique: Aclarity system fits into a trailer that parks onsite, mineralizing and breaking down PFAS molecules. The company is working on a system to handle 180,000 gallons each day, which it says is near the upper limit of what it says waste treatment plants process.

Aclarity's PFAS-killing trailer for big water treatment plants and landfills.

Allonnia

The challenge: Attempts to remove and eliminate PFAS are often energy- and chemical-intensive. Allonia seeks to harness biology to zap the compounds at large sites such as landfills, airports and water treatment plants.

The pitch: “Nature is the most elegant solution to many of today’s most urgent environmental concerns and works in a circular versus linear economy,” CEO Nicole Richards said. “As an example, over time nature will evolve to break down foreign materials present including man-made contaminants. This is the starting point that Allonnia uses to develop solutions to break down PFAS.”

Headwinds: The Boston-based synbio startup has out-fundraised competitors with $90 million, including a $30 million Series A round in July. Allonnia sprang in 2020 out of the Ferment Consortium, an investment arm of biotech company Gingo Bioworks, which five MIT scientists launched in 2008. 

What’s unique: Allonnia says that although “blunt tools” of bioremediation using natural organisms are established, it hopes to dial up and speed up the natural processes by which bacteria or fungi eat chemicals including PFAS, minimizing the use of energy and chemicals. Detecting, separating and concentrating PFAS come before bio-degrading it, according to CEO Nicole Richards. For separating out PFAS, Allonnia uses a technology that sounds sort of like Scrubbing Bubbles for PFAS: Surface Active Foam Fractionation, or SAFF, produced by EPOC Enviro.

A hint of how Allonnia hopes to demolish PFAS appears in its approach to another “forever chemical,” 1,4-dioxane. The company delivers “a precise dose of microbes into the contaminated water that feed on 1,4-dioxane and breaks it down into water and carbon dioxide as the only byproducts,” Richards said. “Allonnia discovered this naturally occurring microbe and optimized it for simple deployment across a variety of environments.”

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