an hour ago
Uses DMSO (by-product of paper production processes) as solvent. It's pretty nasty. All industrial processes wind up with nasty, and this may be swapping a less tractable and nastier problem for a well understood DMSO handling problem.
2 hours ago
Wait up. They propose to convert DDT trapped in the soil to benzene trapped in the soil? Is not benzene also a toxic and persistent soil pollutant (it is) where the typical remediation is to excavate the bad soil and landfill it? (it is)
https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/gama/do...
There was an old lady who swallowed a fly, she didn’t know why.
an hour ago
They're not leaving it in the soil. The benzene is extracted as a useful byproduct.
33 minutes ago
Yes, they are leaving it in the soil. Prove me wrong with data. It says nothing at all about extracting the waste benzene they created from the soil, neither in the linked article nor in the complete paper, which i did read. The paper specifically describes an in-situ process. If it were economically beneficial to extract benzene from contaminated soil for industrial use, we would already be doing that with the tens of thousands of existing benzene contaminated sites, not creating more of them.
3 minutes ago
> neither in the linked article nor in the complete paper, which i did read.
I'm having trouble finding the paper, can you link please?
6 hours ago
DDT is still sprayed today, indoors, in Africa and Asia to control for mosquitos, including in India.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254251962...
6 hours ago
This looks very promising! Efficiently dehalogenizing toxins, preserving their carbon "skeletons" to be repurposed for valuable (nontoxic) industrial chemicals, creating NaCl (table salt) as a byproduct... seems full of win to me. Here's hoping...
an hour ago
Benzene is quite toxic. The EPA classifies benzene as a known human carcinogen for all routes of exposure. And their method leaves it buried it in the soil. It is not a valuable industrial chemical when it is in the soil, it is a pollutant.
6 hours ago
How does this work on a practical level? Do you scrape the soil to a depth of a foot and submit it to electrolysis or is the soil washed and the sludge then processed? How many grams of halogens does this recover per square acre of contaminated site? Does this sterilise the site?
2 hours ago
Yeah, this makes no sense.
It sounds like it could be used to decontaminate a waste stream, but how do you select out the offending materials from a site?? What magic breaks halogenated bonds while leaving others (which are easier to break) alone? And how does the solvent work?? Remember, teflon only became practical when they found a solvent for it--and it's the solvent that's the real problem. Teflon is non-reactive enough for the body to pretty much ignore, the solvent (which of course isn't 100% removed from the final product) has one reactive spot and is a problem. They've tried to hide behind a game of musical chairs, using "different" solvents, but the dangerous part of the molecule is unchanged as that's what's needed to do it's job. A longer or shorter inert tail makes it "different" from a legal standpoint, not meaningfully different from a toxicity standpoint.
Why am I thinking scam?
an hour ago
The soil is mixed with water to create a slurry which is then passed through filtration units which are sensitive to particular chemicals. Now the soil is fine but your filtration media is highly contaminated.
6 hours ago
Today we scrape however many meters deep of soil and haul off to a landfill. I assume you'd scrape it up, run it through something to pull out everything bigger than a pebble. Wash the pebbles, the rinse water goes with the soil through the cleaning process.
Certainly what comes out of the machine will not be living.
5 hours ago
The real practical and immediate help would be ground water contamination. How many bad chemicals now permeate the water supplies around farming communities. Can this be used to treat the drinking water supply?
6 hours ago
I think itd be meant for the facility that uses the halogenated compounds in the first place, integrated into their process.
6 hours ago
a process that can be used *on site* to render environmental toxins such as DDT and lindane harmless and convert them into valuable chemicals – a breakthrough for the *remediation of contaminated sites*6 hours ago
This article doesn't link to the primary research. It's referencing a Spark Award granted this year for work from 2024 and 2021. Here are the relevant articles:
"SCS Foundation News and Announcements 2025"
https://www.chimia.ch/chimia/article/download/2025_885/2025_...
Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) are highly recalcitrant and toxic compounds that pose a profound threat to ecosystems across the world. One of the most notorious representatives of this class of chemicals is hexachlorocyclohexane (HCH) – a known human carcinogen – a specific isomer of which was used as the insecticide Lindane.
...
In 2021, the groups of Morandi and Waldvogel disclosed a vicinal dihalide shuttle reaction under electrochemical conditions, with which HCH could be fully dechlorinated. In the present work, instead of transferring chlorine to another molecule, we sought to sequester it as an innocuous inorganic chloride salt, which is preferable for large-scale application.
Here's the free-to-read Accepted Manuscript version of the earlier 2021 publication:
"Merging shuttle reactions and paired electrolysis for reversible vicinal dihalogenations"
https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/chab/organ...
6 hours ago
Dr John Todd has figured out and demonstrated a method to remediate DDT-contaminated water without the use of electrolysis, or other energy inputs. He was able to decontaminate one of the top superfund sites. The method is broadly versatile, and requires even lower tech than electrolysis. His methods can also sequester heavy metals. It involves introducing organisms across all of the kingdoms so that they self-organize on the contaminant.
More narrowly, Paul Stamets has worked a lot on mycroremediation — remediating with fungi.
5 hours ago
>Dr John Todd has figured out and demonstrated a method to remediate DDT-contaminated water ... It involves introducing organisms across all of the kingdoms so that they self-organize on the contaminant.
So... he invented the ocean?
5 hours ago
Biomimicry, not invention. He reasoned that the DNA is a vast library for transforming molecules from one to another, and therefore, ecosystems are capable of breaking down pollutants.
In practice, there are multiple vats. The first stage has algae growing, which sequesters the heavy metals. The next stages follow other kinds of ecosystems, such as organisms from swamps. He will mix samples from multiple ecosystems that normally don’t mix so that some kind of novel, self-organizing ecosystem can form around the pollutant.
Then it is measuring and monitoring the contaminants. With the superfund site, he was tracking presence of the top ten pollutants on the EPA list. However, he also shows how people can use much simpler, non-industrial tests — using samples from say, uncontaminated lake water nearby and use a microscope to see if the water being treated will kill those microorganisms. This allows for remediation to be executed by people who don’t have access to labs, but still need a way to test their water.
A much simpler version of this that follows the same design principles is capable of local, onsite treatment of ordinary black water.
5 hours ago
Likely not what you’re describing, but this hypothetical is what came to mind.
Consider if organism A consumes organism B in a symbiotic way. E.g., organism B makes berries.
Then, we engineer A to seek out and consume DDT, perhaps by making DDT delicious or fragrant to A.
Unexpected consequence: organism B evolves to produce berries that are absolutely redolent with DDT.
This might happen centuries later, due to the DDT-phillic genes outlasting the presence of artificial DDT in the environment, or it could happen much sooner, or it might never happen. Hard to know. “Life finds a way.”
6 hours ago
> Dr John Todd
…who is this? This guy [1]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Todd_(Canadian_biologist)
5 hours ago
That is the dude.
5 hours ago
short, sweet, got the zam. for toxic waste sites (superfund), and land fills this checks all the boxes. Given that many of the older developed areas that have contaminated sites are also building out solar power, and pushing electricity prices into the negative, I believe that this could be set up to run full tilt, when power was cheap, and idle when it is expensive.