Destroying Forever Chemicals

September 19th, 2025

Elucidating high-temperature chemical reactions to safeguard thermal destruction technologies for PFAS.

Figure (AI-generated): Hazardous waste incinerator.

The challenge

Absent natural degradation mechanisms, are PFAS really forever or are there engineered solutions that can break them down?

Traditional waste management, water treatment, and soil remediation technologies can help collect and concentrate PFAS. But rather than landfilling these wastes, destruction of PFAS into unproblematic end products would be desirable. As new technologies for PFAS destruction are being developed, thermal technologies such as hazardous waste incineration are the only existing ones available to handle the large amounts of PFAS-impacted wastes our society generates. But can chemicals that were designed specifically for heat resistance be incinerated at all? What comes out of the smokestack?

Our response

Building international collaborations to collect multiple lines of evidence at all scales.

To tackle this complex problem, we collaborate with institutions on three continents – the German Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing, Colorado State University (USA), and the University of Technology Sydney. Our research starts at the most fundamental scale, using computational quantum chemistry and molecular beam mass spectrometry to elucidate how chemical bonds break at high temperature. Next, we perform bench-scale furnace experiments to determine the impacts of process variables such as oxygen concentration, water vapour, and catalytic surfaces. Finally, we validate our measurements and model predictions in the real world during commercial-scale PFAS incineration trials at Earthsure’s thermal desorption plant in Dandenong South, VIC and BASF’s hazardous waste incinerator in Ludwigshafen, Germany. Thomé-Kozmiensky Publishing in Germany is helping us disseminate our findings worldwide.

The results

Providing the knowledge of how to incinerate PFAS safely.

We found that most PFAS start to break down at surprisingly low temperatures between 200-700 °C. However, these initial decomposition reactions produce chemicals that are known as strong greenhouse gasses. Given these gasses only reside in an incinerator for about 2 seconds, higher temperatures of at least 950 °C, better 1000 °C are needed to fully break the PFAS down. Counterintuitively, we also found that one of the most important ingredients for a clean burn is water, which prevents the formation of harmful by-products.

The findings of our research will ensure that: