Perfluoroalkyl compounds, also called PFAS, are a group of chemical components that gains more awareness concerning environmental impact. The PFAS components are very persistent, very toxic and create often very severe soil and groundwater pollutions. These components are also very common in fire-fighting equipment, piping as well as waste waters.
As everybody knows, do we have diffuse elevated ‘background’ PFAS levels in the topsoil of the Netherlands. But, beside this diffuse background pollution, there are also many hundreds of source zones of PFAS impacted soils. Often these source zones can be find at locations where in the past activities with PFAS containing fire-fighting foam where carried out, at production locations or waste storages or handling.
Until today there are no easy solutions to clean PFAS impacted soils. Many source zones are still to be discovered. Summarized it is clear to see that this is an emerging challenge.
Regarding PFAS soil treatment an often looked at technology is washing of the soils. The result is a clean sand fraction, but a still heavily polluted fine (clay) fraction and polluted washing water. Such a solution is often not very favorable in the Dutch and Belgium situation with all its clayey soils.
Our thermal remediation partner TRS Group from the USA has developed an alternative treatment technology for PFAS impacted soils. By heating the soils in- or ex-situ till ca. 400oC the PFAS molecules will be vaporized from the soils. These PFAS vapors are condensed for further (water) treatment or disposal. The result is a clean soil. Bench and Pilot scale tests show that treatment efficiencies of over 99% can be achieved. In the following presentation the technology is presented in more detail.
Would you like to learn more about this solution or would you like to know if it can also be an option for your site? Please do contact either Jack van Rossum or Marco van den Brand via (+31) 318 624 624 or info@hmvt.nl.