For decades, Sam Hammond and her children ate eggs laid by the rare ducks she keeps in her garden in Thornton-Cleveleys, a town just north of Blackpool in northwest England. Earlier this year, the local council hand-delivered a letter telling her the eggs were contaminated with PFOA, a known human carcinogen. PFOA belongs to a large group of synthetic chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), often dubbed “forever chemicals” because they do not degrade and instead accumulate over time in soil, water supplies, and human and animal blood. The levels in the eggs were so high that eating a single egg a week would put her 10 times over the European safe limit. Last week, Hammond learned what those years of exposure have left behind. Her blood contains 25 nanograms of PFAS per milliliter, above the 20 ng/mL level at which the U.S. National Academies’ guidance advise closer medical screening. Her son’s reading was 111 ng/mL.
The suspected source is the AGC Chemicals Europe plant on the nearby Hillhouse industrial site. It released large quantities of PFOA until 2012, eight years before the chemical was banned worldwide. Wyre Borough Council and the Environment Agency opened an investigation in 2024. Residents living within a kilometer of the plant have since been told to wash and peel homegrown produce and to stop eating eggs from local birds.
The law firm Leigh Day, scientists from Manchester Metropolitan University, and Watershed Investigations organized blood tests for 49 residents. Nearly 70% had PFOA levels in a category associated with higher risk of kidney cancer, testicular cancer, and ulcerative colitis, and none fell into the lowest-risk band.
AGC announced in July that it will close the plant. While the factory will soon be gone, the chemicals will remain unless new treatments that scientists, established companies, and startups are working on can break them down.
Cleaning up sites like the one on the Hillhouse industrial site requires destroying the chemicals, not just moving them.
PFAS destruction — eliminating these forever chemicals for good — is one of the top 10 emerging technologies identified in a June report from the World Economic Forum, produced in collaboration with the open-science publisher Frontiers.
Regulation is now driving the market and the new approaches being developed are promising, but large-scale deployment remains constrained by process integration, energy efficiency, reliability, sensing, and a funding gap between laboratory research and commercial infrastructure, says Qingguo “Jack” Huang, a professor at the University of Georgia and a co-author of the PFAS section of the Forum report.
Treatment Pathways
PFAS, which industries have manufactured and used globally since the 1940s, have chemical structures built on strong carbon-fluorine bonds that make them highly resistant to heat, water, oil, and grease. That makes them ideal for applications such as nonstick frying pans, but the same properties also make them persist in the environment in pernicious ways.
PFAS treatment will likely require multiple destruction chemistries rather than one dominant approach, says Huang. These include:
- Supercritical water oxidation: fast, high-pressure, energy-intensive, and better suited to smaller volumes.
- Electrochemical treatment: potentially applicable to larger volumes and ambient operation.
- UV-driven photocatalysis: dependent on water clarity and vulnerable to interfering compounds.
Concentration technologies such as foam fractionation, ion-exchange resin, and nanofiltration can reduce the volume sent to destruction, lowering energy and treatment costs, but concentrated impurities may make destruction more difficult.
The central engineering challenge, he says, is matching the concentrated waste stream to a compatible destruction technology.
AI-enhanced automation could further improve PFAS destruction technologies and overall treatment performance by adjusting operating conditions in response to changing water chemistry and contamination levels, Huang says. However, this would require reliable continuous PFAS sensors and sufficient operating data.
Scale And Cost
Current proof points remain limited in scale and reliability compared with continuous municipal or industrial wastewater treatment.
Laboratory electrochemical treatment may require a few kilowatt-hours per cubic meter under ideal conditions. Factoring in a possible 100-fold penalty for treating real-world water, total costs could approach $100 per cubic meter, including energy, operations, and capital, says Huang. Reducing costs to roughly $20 to $30 per cubic meter within five years would make the technology more acceptable, given that municipal wastewater treatment is estimated to cost $30 to $50 per cubic meter.\
Emerging Players
Commercial efforts include electrochemical oxidation systems such as AECOM’s DE-FLUORO process, which is based on University of Georgia technology, and those offered by Axine and Aclarity, as well as hydrothermal treatment startups and supercritical water treatment companies.
Recent developments of note include:
- Minneapolis-based Claros Technologies closed a $55 million Series B round on July 28 to commercialize its UV-based destruction system in North America, Europe, and Asia.
- France’s Veolia announced in August test results from its high-temperature incinerator in Ellesmere Port, UK, showing up to 99.9999% destruction of nine target PFAS, positioning the company to handle a 10,000-tonne UK stockpile of firefighting foam. Veolia cites a forecast that the market for PFAS concentration and destruction will be worth $8 billion by 2036.
- PFAROS, a new EU-funded consortium of 91 partners focused on PFAS in pharmaceuticals and healthcare, was launched in September. Belgium’s IBA and Germany’s Bayer co-lead the work on end-of-life and destruction technologies, with IBA testing electron-beam destruction.
To really scale the new approaches, the commercialization gaps holding back the sector must be overcome, says Huang. Universities develop and validate concepts, while large companies often prefer mature, low-risk technologies, he says. Startups often lack the funding runway for prolonged scale-up.
Regulations Are A Major Driver of PFAS Destruction
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency compliance requirements are expected to be a major driver of deployment by 2031. Regulators in Japan and Australia are also taking proactive steps to combat PFAS. Meanwhile, Europe is preparing the most sweeping chemicals restriction in its history. The proposal, submitted to the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) in January 2023 by Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden, would cover an estimated 14,000 PFAS across virtually every industrial sector. It marks a break with the past. The EU has so far banned these chemicals one at a time. The new approach treats the entire class as the problem and carves out exemptions only where industries can show they still need the chemicals.
In March, both of ECHA’s scientific committees backed an EU-wide restriction with targeted derogations. The Risk Assessment Committee concluded that PFAS pose growing risks to people and the environment and that current rules are not enough to control emissions. Where exemptions are granted, it wants site-level PFAS management plans, emissions monitoring, consumer labeling, and reporting of emissions from manufacturing and industrial sites to ECHA. The Socio-Economic Analysis Committee endorsed the direction but struck a more cautious tone, stressing the need for exemptions where industries lack viable alternatives. Even so, the committees recommended removing or significantly narrowing many of the derogations in the original proposal. If the European Commission follows their advice, products ranging from medical devices to cosmetics could face severe restrictions from 2029.
Several narrower measures are already biting. Since January 2026, member states have been required to monitor PFAS in all drinking water and keep levels within EU limits. Since August 12, 2026, food-contact packaging has had to meet strict PFAS limits under the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, with no transition period for stock placed on the market after that date. A group-wide restriction on PFAS in firefighting foams was adopted in October 2025.
None of this applies in Thornton-Cleveleys. Since Brexit, Britain has regulated chemicals under its own UK REACH system, and its PFAS Plan, published in February, favors monitoring over an immediate crackdown. A parliamentary committee has warned that UK REACH has fallen behind the EU in restricting PFAS. In July, the government rejected calls for rapid restrictions on PFAS in nonessential consumer products, saying it would instead wait to see how the EU’s universal restriction handles them and would reform UK REACH to align more closely with Brussels by December 2028.
Destruction Is Now Working Where Previously It Was Not
The growing, legally mandated incentive to destroy rather than contain PFAS is beginning to show results, says the World Economic Forum report. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, a facility has been continuously destroying PFAS drawn from landfill runoff since 2023, among the first operations of its kind to reach commercial scale. At the other end of the contamination landscape, Daikin Industries, a major PFAS producer, completed a large-scale field trial processing more than 170,000 gallons [(about 645,000 liters] of its own industrial wastewater using UV photochemical destruction. “Together, the two cases show that destruction is now working where it previously could not — from legacy contamination in municipal groundwater to active industrial waste streams — and that the carbon-fluorine bond is no longer guaranteed to be unbreakable,” the report says.
For localized destruction to take hold, regulation would need to recognize destruction rather than containment alone, requiring proof of destruction supported by harmonized verification standards across jurisdictions, says the Forum report.
The good news is that in as little as three to five years, regulatory pressure, combined with scientific and technological progress, could provide practical tools to prevent future damage to the environment and human health from forever chemicals, says Huang. But for Hammond, her children, and other Thornton-Cleveleys residents, the existing damage threatens to be everlasting.
