Last week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced their first PFAS Technology, Evaluation, Coordination, and Harmonization (PFAS TECH) strategy.
Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, announced on 26 October that the new PFAS TECH strategy to boost tech innovation.
The resulting tech will support practical tools, funding, and technological assistance in reducing the impact of PFAS.
Encouraging collaboration
The PFAS TECH strategy prioritises collaboration between the EPA, federal partners, states, local leaders, and the private sector, with three distinct goals for the EPA:
- Power innovation in research and development by accelerating new PFAS treatment and destruction technologies through funding, forming new partnerships, and supporting early-stage innovation. In keeping with the Trump EPA’s commitment to cooperative federalism, this effort includes working with federal partners, states, local businesses, universities, and water systems to test promising methods like foam fractionation, supercritical water oxidation, and other emerging treatment approaches.
- Demonstrate what’s possible through pilot-scale initiatives by conducting projects at Superfund sites, military facilities, wastewater treatment plants, and drinking water systems that will test performance under real conditions, lower technical risk, and show communities what PFAS cleanup options are practical and scalable.
- Translate progress into practical actions by creating user-friendly guidance, launching the Break the Bond Navigator, sharing updated technology information, and helping water systems access funding and technical assistance.
Lee Zeldin, EPA administrator, said: “The Trump EPA is laser-focused on making America healthy again by developing real and tangible agency-wide strategies to protect Americans from exposure to PFAS. Technology innovation is essential to accelerating our efforts to address these contaminants, and EPA’s new PFAS TECH strategy will advance scientific discovery, demonstrate the real-world feasibility of advanced technologies, and help reduce PFAS in the environment.”
Researching the destruction of PFAS
The EPA intends to issue grant funding for research related to the destruction of PFAS, under the Science to Achieve Results (STAR) or Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant programmes, for example.
Jess Kramer, EPA PFAS lead and assistant administrator for the Office of Water, said: “Partnerships are the key to unlocking innovation and next-generation technologies. To that end, EPA’s Office of Water is actively pursuing public-private partnerships to promote research, development, and scalable water treatment technologies for PFAS removal. These partnerships will accelerate technology breakthroughs to reduce PFAS in water while also reducing the cost of treatment to save money.”
Teresa Booeshaghi, associate administrator for the Office of Applied Science and Environmental Solutions, said: “EPA is prioritising research and development on PFAS and ensuring our science is gold standard and directly applicable to needs in local communities as they work to address PFAS pollution. One such study is conducting full-scale pilot tests to optimise the performance of drinking water treatment methods being deployed all over the country.”
Steven Cook, principal deputy assistant administrator for the Office of Land and Emergency Management, said: “Hazardous waste cleanup sites managed by EPA project managers are actively addressing PFAS contamination, and they can provide excellent opportunities for advancing critical technology to sample for and remediate PFAS. We have pilot projects ongoing across multiple regions, ranging from foam fractionation for PFAS removal from groundwater to evaluation of the efficacy of incremental sampling, which could drastically lower sampling costs.”
Researchers at Arizona State University have already identified a technique for destroying PFAS molecules using hydrogen and a palladium catalyst. Read more about the research and its results here.
