Some parts that stood out to me:
When officials from Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE), first visited the Heritage Crystal Clean Grand Rapids facility, they displayed “a bit of skepticism on the front end, you know, not really understanding what we were doing,” recalled Brian Recatto, the president and CEO of Heritage Crystal Clean. “They wanted us to do a bit more modeling as we installed the equipment, which we did, to prove that we didn’t need an air permit.”
Since then, both Recatto and Trueba say that feedback has been increasingly positive. “They [Michigan state officials] love the fact that we’re destroying the contaminants versus transferring the contaminants,” said Recatto.
A spokesman for EGLE confirmed that the agency has visited the facility, but said the agency could not assess its performance.
"This is new technology and EGLE hasn’t reviewed it (we haven’t seen any performance data yet) thoroughly enough to comment on it,” EGLE spokesman Scott Dean told Wisconsin Examiner in an email message.
“So, in a nutshell, that’s what we do … we use temperature and pressure to create an environment that completely annihilates PFAS.”
The chemicals break down into water, salt, and carbon dioxide, he said. After that, the water is then recycled back into the system it came from.
Recatto said the facility’s daily capacity is expected to be 160,000 to 165,000 gallons of leachate. More PFAS Annihilator systems were being installed at the time he spoke with the Examiner.
He estimated the wastewater treatment plant will be sending “a couple hundred gallons a day of concentrated material to be processed in the Annihilator.”
Even when water treatment results in greater than 99% reduction, the remaining water still has PFOS and PFOA levels above the proposed federal ceiling, the group noted. PFOS and PFOA are two of the most widespread and best understood PFAS chemicals, the group said in a statement. Those “forever chemicals” have been linked to cancers, birth defects, thyroid disorders, and other chronic diseases in humans and other animal species, the organization’s statement said.
Trueba said that “like any industrial water, this water is safe enough to put back into the water treatment facility in Wyoming, Michigan, for water purification and reclamation. No industrial waste water (post initial processing) is safe for human consumption until it goes through the local water treatment facility, in this case the city of Wyoming.”
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The main problem with PFAS isn’t really getting it out of water, but the amount of investment in power and resources to run the processes to remove it, in addition to the starting investments to construct these treatment processes. This is going to be a huge problem for landfills and industries that produce PFAS by-products in their wastewater stream, since as noted in the article, these types of wastewater can be so contaminated that a 99% reduction is still above the proposed drinking water limits.
Since there are no national wastewater discharge limits for PFAS this is really just gambling on dilution to an acceptable level though the wastewater treatment process and discharge into the environment before it enters a water supply downstream. The other side of that coin it that a significant portion of PFAS is captured in the sludge solids in treatment. In the face of that material being contaminated with PFAS, it is likely soon going to be illegal to apply biosolids as fertilizer and so therefore the only direct disposal that is left is to put them in a landfill. Then eventually the PFAS is likely to find itself in the leachate, as the cycle completes.