Microbial degradation offers way to tackle chlorinated PFAS in wastewater

Chlorinated per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have been degraded using microbes, offering a new way to tackle these persistent pollutants that have been dubbed ‘forever chemicals’ by the media.

A University of California, Riverside team in the US reports that a specific class of PFAS, chlorinated polyfluorocarboxylic acids, can be broken down by the action of two species of anaerobic bacterium. The researchers discovered that the bacteria can perform reductive, hydrolytic and eliminative dechlorination, as the first step towards defluorinating these synthetic compounds. Following dechlorination, the bacteria were then able to partially dechlorinate some of the products, with the hydrolytic dechlorination pathway being the most important.