WYOMING, MI — At one end of the facility, tanker trucks unload a toxic soup. By the time it leaves the other end, only water, carbon dioxide and salt remain.
At Heritage-Crystal Clean in Wyoming, a new technology is busy taking the forever out of “forever chemicals.” The West Michigan facility is home to the PFAS Annihilator system, a first-to-market treatment process that destroys concentrated PFAS compounds in landfill leachate.
Rather than simply filtering out the chemicals, the Annihilator uses pressure and temperature to break apart the strong carbon-fluorine bonds that give PFAS chemicals their desirable commercial properties but also allow them to persist almost indefinitely once released into the environment.
The result is treated water considered safe enough to deposit into a municipal wastewater facility for eventual discharge back into local waterways.
It’s operating at commercial scale in Michigan.
“This is real now,” said David Trueba, president and CEO of Revive Environmental, a venture capital-backed startup partnering with Battelle and Crystal Clean to market the Annihilator as “the first closed-loop PFAS remediation solution” on the market.
“It’s not too expensive,” he said. “It’s scalable and available.”
Trueba’s company, Revive, was launched in January out of Battelle Memorial Institute, a tax-exempt research and development giant based in Ohio. Battelle isn’t a household name, but its vast portfolio of inventions includes the copy machine, cruise control and the retail barcode.
In 2019, Battelle began adapting a process to destroy PFAS by heating water to more than 700 degrees Fahrenheit and pressurizing it to more than 3,200 pounds per-square-inch.
Under such “supercritical” conditions, compounds that do not readily break down normally can, with the addition of an oxidizing agent, decompose into harmless byproducts.
“We wanted to be sure that we weren’t engaging in a technology that was going to have another waste stream to be able to deal with,” said Amy Dindal, Battelle’s director of environmental research and development.
The process, called supercritical water oxidation, has been used since the 1980s to destroy nerve agents, radioactive waste and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Two years ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) identified it as one of four promising technologies for destroying PFAS but noted that its widespread application had been limited by high energy demand and other technological challenges.
Battelle is not the only entity to devise a supercritical PFAS destruction method. A North Carolina company called 374Water is marketing a similar supercritical process, which is scheduled to debut commercially this year in California at the Orange County Sanitation District, where it will treat biosolid sludges as part of a demonstration project.
But Battelle, Revive and Crystal Clean are claiming first-to-market status with the Annihilator, which is already commercially treating leachate using the supercritical process.
“Most of the PFAS destruction methods are still at bench scale, field scale or pilot project stage,” said Abby Hendershott, director of the Michigan PFAS Action Response Team at the Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE).
Alongside supercritical oxidation, other destruction technologies such as pyrolysis and gasification, hydrothermal alkaline treatment and electrochemical oxidation are emerging.
“I’m very excited to see these things starting to get into a real large-scale applicability,” said Hendershott, whose team, MPART, coordinates investigations into more than 250 sites around Michigan where PFAS has contaminated the groundwater, rivers, and other ecosystems.
“They all have a place and there’s no one technology that’s going to be right for all the sites and all the different solutions,” she said. “We have to really look at how do we use the research and the technology to best fit the individual sites.”
In Wyoming, Revive’s equipment is set up inside the Heritage Crystal-Clean facility, where the Annihilator fits inside a pair of shipping containers. One contains a technician lab and the other performs the destruction.
Tanker trucks presently bring in more than 100,000 gallons of raw, untreated landfill leachate a day. The raw material is concentrated using a surface foam fractionation process and then fed into the Annihilator, which can process up to 500 gallons-per-day. The full treatment is branded “4never.”
Although the energy demand for getting water to supercritical conditions is high — Trueba said the Annihilator uses a “couple kilowatts an hour” on startup — electricity from the chemical reaction itself can be recycled to cut down on costs.
The actual destruction step takes less than a minute. The water that comes out of the Annihilator is typically below a detection or reporting limit, said Dindal.
“Typically, it’s in the single parts-per-trillion (ppt) range.”
The facility is currently processing leachate from three Michigan landfills. Leachate — the slurry that collects at the bottom of landfills — typically contains high concentrations of PFAS chemicals. Leachate often goes to a municipal wastewater plant, which pass the chemicals into waterways because standard treatment processes cannot remove them.
Michigan wastewater plants must limit their discharge to 12-ppt for the individual compound PFOS, which readily bioaccumulates in fish and aquatic life. Most require wastewater pre-treatment from industrial customers.
Brian Reccato, president of Crystal Clean, contacted Battelle in 2020 after learning about their supercritical research. Michigan was eventually chosen for the project launch because it has aggressive water quality standards.
The foam fractionation units which concentrate PFAS before destruction are designed for installation at landfills and other industrial sites, Reccato said.
“We would concentrate the waste at the source and then truck the resulting concentrate back to our facilities where the Annihilator would be located,” he said.
Depending on the logistics of getting the raw water to the process units, Recatto said the treatment cost is running between 15 and 40 cents per-gallon.
Crystal Clean has 11 facilities around the country ready for an Annihilator. Trueba said there are currently six units in production and planned for deployment this fall. Up to 25 might be built, he said, depending on demand.
In addition to landfill leachate and industrial wastewater, the technology also destroys PFAS in firefighting foam. Battelle also has contracts with Department of Defense, including one to eventually deploy an Annihilator unit at Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Oscoda to process PFAS contaminated water pulled from the ground during ongoing remedial investigations.
“It’s a tremendous opportunity for us. It’s a billion dollar-plus market — multibillion dollars if you believe everything you read,” Recatto said. “We’re very optimistic about it.”
“Expect to see us in other states soon.”
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