A commercial deployment, a pharmaceutical pilot, and a groundwater remediation study show what permanent PFAS destruction looks like at scale
On 1 October 2026, Claros Technologies and Daikin America announced the signing of a commercial agreement for full-scale deployment of the ClarosTechUV™ PFAS destruction system at Daikin’s manufacturing facility in Decatur, Alabama. The agreement is the culmination of a multi-phase collaboration that progressed from pilot demonstration to commercial optimisation and now to a permanent, continuously operating installation integrated directly into Daikin’s manufacturing operations.
From optimisation to full-scale deployment
That progression is documented in the numbers. In a commercial optimisation run completed in December 2025, ClarosTechUV™ treated more than 170,000 gallons (640,000 litres) of industrial process water at Daikin’s Decatur site, achieving greater than 99.99% destruction of target PFAS species – in single-pass, continuous operation with stable performance and strong energy efficiency throughout.
“For decades, organisations have focused primarily on managing PFAS – capturing it, concentrating it, and transporting it elsewhere,” said Michelle Bellanca, CEO and Co-Founder of Claros Technologies. “This announcement demonstrates that permanent PFAS destruction has crossed the threshold from scientific achievement to commercial reality.”
“Daikin America, Inc. is pleased to continue our partnership with Claros through our agreement for full-scale PFAS destruction deployment to demonstrate our commitment to innovation and environmental stewardship”, said Yuichi Hashikawa, CEO of Daikin America, Inc.
The agreement extends beyond a single installation, establishing a long-term relationship between the two companies and creating opportunities to evaluate additional applications for ClarosTechUV™ across Daikin’s global operations.
Daikin America, established in 1991, is a leading manufacturer of high-performance materials used in critical applications across various industry sectors, including semiconductor manufacturing, medical devices, and clean energy – sectors that rely on fluorochemistry, including PFAS, that cannot be eliminated from production overnight. Claros’ technology is designed to let manufacturers continue that essential work while destroying the PFAS generated in the process on-site, rather than transporting it elsewhere for storage or disposal.
The deployment pairs ClarosTechUV™ with ClarosLabs™, the company’s ISO/IEC 17025:2017-accredited analytical division, combining on-site destruction with continuous, independently validated performance verification – creating a single platform for treatment, measurement, and operational assurance as the installation is incorporated into broader facility improvements at Daikin’s Decatur campus over the next several years.
As governments around the world continue to strengthen PFAS regulations across drinking water, industrial wastewater, and manufacturing operations, industries increasingly need technologies that permanently eliminate PFAS rather than simply transferring it between waste streams. Claros raised $55m in a Series B round in July 2026 to accelerate the global commercialisation of its PFAS destruction technology – capital now underpinning deployments like the one with Daikin America.
In May 2026, Claros CEO Michelle Bellanca joined EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at a Washington, D.C. roundtable on PFAS management, alongside other industry technology providers. “We are accelerating the development of technologies to destroy PFAS – not just move it from one place to another,” Zeldin told attendees. Bellanca pointed to the shift in the economics: “If you can economically destroy the long, the short, and the ultra-short compounds, that changes the return-on-investment equation.”
TFA Destroyed at the source: Real-world pharmaceutical proof
Trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), an ultra-short-chain PFAS, is one of the hardest fluorinated compounds to treat – impervious to activated carbon and to the advanced oxidation processes that can address longer-chain PFAS. Effective TFA defluorination requires a reductive, not oxidative, process. ClarosTechUV™ uses UV-driven advanced reductive chemistry to break the carbon-fluorine bonds responsible for TFA’s persistence, yielding true mineralisation – confirmed by the complete, quantitative recovery of inorganic fluoride in laboratory testing.
Field and laboratory trials across industrial and pharmaceutical customers routinely demonstrate TFA destruction exceeding 99%, spanning recirculating-flow, continuous single-pass, and static-batch operating modes, with results reaching as high as 99.999% under batch conditions. At commercial throughputs exceeding 25,000 gallons (100 m³) per day and residence times under 20 minutes, the system has sustained greater than 96% destruction of ultra-short C2-C3 perfluorinated organics over 12 hours of continuous operation, using less than 20 kWh/m³ of energy. ClarosTechUV™ permanently destroys 99.99% of target PFAS species —long, short, and ultra-short chains, including TFA.
Commercial ClarosTechUV™ systems are designed to operate continuously or in batch mode across a wide throughput range – from 10 to 250,000 gallons (30 to 940,000 litres) per day – destroying between 90% and 99.999% of target PFAS species, including TFA, depending on configuration and water chemistry.
That capability has now been demonstrated under real-world manufacturing conditions. In September 2026, Claros completed a pilot of ClarosTechUV™ at the flagship Swiss campus of Bachem AG in Bubendorf – one of the world’s leading manufacturers of peptide and oligonucleotide active pharmaceutical ingredients, including the API used in blockbuster GLP-1 therapies. After more than two weeks of testing under full manufacturing conditions, the system met or exceeded Bachem’s established performance metrics for TFA.
As reported in a recent article in the Swiss newspaper Volksstimme, Patrick Barth, Head of Group Communications at Bachem, said that following ClarosTechUV™ treatment of the site’s industrial wastewater, “only very low residual concentrations of TFA were detectable.” André Casagrande, Site Manager at Bachem’s Bubendorf campus, placed the pilot within the company’s wider approach to manufacturing: “Innovation and environmental responsibility go hand in hand for us. We want not only to help people through our products, but also to play a responsible role with regard to the environment.”
TFA is drawing increasing regulatory attention on both sides of the Atlantic. European authorities are evaluating broader PFAS restrictions under the REACH framework, while the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed naming TFA among 30 contaminants requiring nationwide monitoring under the Sixth Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule (UCMR 6). Against that backdrop, the Bachem pilot shows how manufacturers can address ultra-short-chain PFAS at the source, on-site, without changing their existing treatment setup.
For an ultra-short-chain compound that has, until now, resisted destruction at industrial scale, Claros’ combination of laboratory data and real manufacturing validation is a meaningful marker for an industry still working out how to respond to TFA.
Proof in contaminated groundwater
Groundwater remediation presents a different challenge: instead of clean process water, treatment systems must handle low-transparency, highly turbid matrices with variable chemistry. To test performance under these conditions, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) supplied Claros with foam fractionation concentrate generated from roughly one million gallons of contaminated groundwater and surface water from a remediation site in Lake Elmo, Minnesota – a matrix with PFOS at roughly 28-30 mg/L, PFOA at roughly 9-10 mg/L, and near-zero UV transmittance in its raw form.
In an integrated treatment train – foam fractionation, filtration, and ClarosTechUV™ destruction – Claros achieved greater than or equal to 99.99% destruction of PFOS and PFOA in the commercial-scale reactor in just four hours, treating a volume of concentrate derived from approximately 600,000 gallons of groundwater. Total organic fluorine dropped by nearly 88%, with a corresponding rise in inorganic fluoride confirming that the PFAS had been mineralised, not merely relocated.
The Lake Elmo results open a broader opportunity for Claros in treating contaminated groundwater and remediation sites at scale, working alongside capture-and-concentration technologies such as foam fractionation that are already established across the remediation industry – rather than requiring utilities and remediation authorities to adopt an entirely new treatment approach.
“This pilot shows that ClarosTechUV™ maintains performance as it scales and integrates with upstream processes,” said John Brockgreitens, Co-Founder and VP of Product Development at Claros Technologies. “That’s what turns this from a lab solution into something that can be deployed at scale,” he added. “Even highly complex water matrices can be treated effectively with this system.”
“When you get to this level of performance and efficiency, it changes the equation entirely”, said Lucas Harvey, Global Head of Sales at Claros Technologies. “There’s now a strong incentive for remediation authorities and others to move toward simple, easy-to-implement solutions that actually destroy PFAS, rather than simply managing it.”
The Lake Elmo study brings the total volume of PFAS-impacted water Claros has treated across laboratory, pilot, and commercial deployments to more than one million gallons – demonstrating that ClarosTechUV™ performance holds not only in clean industrial process water, but in some of the most difficult contaminated groundwater matrices that remediation teams encounter.
One platform: Destruction and verification
Across three core applications – industrial wastewater, contaminated groundwater, and municipal wastewater – Claros Technologies pairs two capabilities: ClarosTechUV™, which permanently destroys 99.99% of target PFAS species – long, short, and ultra-short chains – and ClarosLabs™, its ISO/IEC 17025:2017-accredited analytical division, which provides support for customers through PFAS detection, quantification, and exposure assessment.
Together, the two divisions give manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and remediation authorities a single, on-site platform for treating PFAS and verifying the result, without creating an additional waste stream to store, transport, or dispose of elsewhere. The approach is designed to fit within an existing treatment train rather than require a new one.
Founded in 2018 and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Claros Technologies is on a mission to take the ‘forever’ out of ‘forever chemicals’. From a full-scale industrial installation to a pharmaceutical manufacturing pilot to a state-agency groundwater study, the throughline is the same: PFAS destroyed permanently, on-site, at high-flow and verified independently – not managed, but eliminated.
For an industry that has spent decades managing PFAS rather than eliminating it, that combination – destruction verified by independent analytics, deployed across industrial wastewater, pharmaceutical, semiconductor and groundwater – marks a shift from pilot projects to permanent infrastructure reality.
Please Note: This is a Commercial Profile
