Holistic Life Cycle Management to Make "Forever Chemicals" Safe Forever

Mohan Sankaran (NPRE)
Rohit Bhargava (BioE)
Wenyan Mei (Comparative Biosciences)
Xiao Su (ChBE)

Research Problem 

Chemicals are central to our daily lives, but many persist in our environment well beyond their use, leading to unknown and negative impacts on human well-being. Substantial research has been focused on how chemicals are made, their degradation, and their toxicity. Despite these efforts, a major gap exists because these studies are performed in isolation, disconnected from the overall context of the chemical life cycle. Typically, studies only examine one aspect for a small set of chemicals, missing either the impact of their intervention or a comparative analysis of alternate approaches. We propose a paradigm shift to enable comprehensive and molecularly-agnostic studies, including separation, degradation, and toxicity assessment of end-products, by developing a holistic life cycle management (HLM) approach.

HLM Vision

Our vision is to establish a HLM approach to make modern chemicals safe, by integrating separation at their dilute concentrations in wastewater and natural water sources, degradation to either environmentally-benign forms or recovery of resources such as feedstocks for valuable products, and assessment of the biotoxicity. The approach is comprehensive, covering all key aspects of the life cycle of a chemical after its production and end of-use, to make it possible to safely release to the environment or enable reuse through upcycling, and is chemically agnostic, ultimately being applicable to a broad range of chemicals and industries such as, but not limited to, plastics, pesticides, and mining tails.

Larger Impact

Demonstrating HLM of PFAS will establish a template that can then be extended to other chemicals of interest to researchers on campus and in the larger scientific community. All the research components, from electrochemical separation and degradation, to infrared imaging and the zebrafish models, are general and can be adapted to other molecules.