A cheaper way to fight 'forever chemicals': How pH-controlled traps could clean drinking water

Forever chemicals don't break down and don't disappear, but Florida International University scientists have developed a safer, cheaper, and reusable solution that could remove these chemicals. The institutional report frames the development in practical terms and ties it to the broader mission or observing effort.

This matters because chemistry gains force when a claimed structure or process can be described with enough precision to be reproduced by others. Synthetic routes, spectroscopic signatures, yield under defined conditions and stability under realistic operating parameters are the currency of credibility in chemistry, and a result that lacks these details cannot be evaluated independently. The distance between a discovery on a laboratory bench and a process that works reliably at scale is measured in years of optimization, and each step reveals constraints that were invisible at smaller scale. By Christine Calvo, Florida International University This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Add as preferred source Journal of Hazardous Materials Advances (2025).

Journal of Hazardous Materials Advances (2025). Candidate Rodrigo Restrepo Osorio have created a new cleanup approach that captures and releases PFAS chemicals on demand by using water's own pH level.

The system offers a sustainable way to address the growing challenge of PFAS contamination —one of the most persistent environmental and health threats today. By harnessing the power of pH, this method makes it possible to remove PFAS from waterways, while allowing the system to be reused.

The work is published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials Advances. Current water treatment methods are largely ineffective for PFAS remediation, costly, and/or require the treatment of the entire drinking water supply," O'Shea said.

The broader interest lies in whether the claimed property or reaction pathway can be characterized with enough precision to support replication by other groups. Chemistry has a replication problem that is less discussed than the one in psychology or medicine, but it is real: synthetic procedures that work reliably in one laboratory sometimes fail to transfer, for reasons ranging from impure starting materials to undocumented temperature sensitivities. A result that comes with full experimental detail and a clear characterization of the product is far more valuable than one that reports a discovery without the procedural backbone.

We need a way to concentrate and remove them from our water supplies. " O'Shea realized the key is pH. But when the water becomes more alkaline, or when a basic substance like baking soda is added, both the PFAS and the material take on negative charges and repel each other.

Because the account originates with Phys. org Chemistry, it functions best as a primary institutional report that is close to the data and operations, not as independent scientific validation. Institutional communications are produced by organizations with legitimate interests in presenting their work in a favorable light, which does not make them unreliable but does make them partial. Details that complicate the narrative, including instrument limitations, unexpected failures and results below projections, tend to be minimized relative to progress messages. Technical documentation and peer-reviewed publications, where they exist, provide the complementary layer that institutional releases cannot substitute.

The next step is to see whether independent groups working with orthogonal techniques reach compatible conclusions, and whether the result scales beyond the conditions used in the original study. Chemical discoveries that matter tend to be ones whose key properties can be measured by multiple spectroscopic, crystallographic or computational methods that are unlikely to share the same blind spots. Scalability, cost and long-term stability under realistic operating conditions are additional filters that come into play before any practical application becomes viable.

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