By Anne Bloksgaard Nielsen. Photo: Niels Krogh Søndergaard

Over the last few years, “PFAS” has become a household word in Denmark. An increasing number of water companies, food producers and local authorities monitoring drinking or bathing water quality have found worrisome PFAS levels, and as yet, no one has an efficient solution for removing it from our drinking water.

This may be about to change if a current project headed by Associate Professor Mads Koustrup Jørgensen and Associate Professor Thorbjørn Terndrup Nielsen is successful.

The project combines two key disciplines at the Department of Chemistry and Bioscience: cyclodextrin chemistry and membranes in a novel approach to membrane filtration using absorption. Mads Koustrup Jørgensen explains:

“Simply put, by washing a membrane in a particular spirit solution of cyclodextrins, we can make the cyclodextrins attach to the membrane surface, making it functional for PFAS absorption without any need for tough chemistry. This has the advantage that membrane manufacturers do not need to change their manufacturing process – we aim to offer a fairly simple secondary treatment that will enable current commercially available membranes to filter PFAS as well,” Thorbjørn Terndrup Nielsen explains and adds:

"As for cleaning the membranes when they are full, we aim to make this easy as well: The membranes will be washed with a suitable solvent to remove the cyclodextrins containing PFAS, and then re-treated with a solution of empty cyclodextrins to re-establish their functionality."

Showing great potential

It is still early in the four-year period of the project, but the progress so far makes the researchers hopeful of a successful outcome. Currently, they are performing experiments in a lab setup, aided by two groups of students and a colleague from Aarhus University, PFAS expert, Associate Professor Zongsu Wei. The aim is to have a proof of concept ready soon that can serve as the basis for the further work in the project.

“Our hope is that in just a few years’ time, we can not only present an efficient method for removing PFAS from our drinking water – but also an economically viable solution that will be easy to adapt and implement. Potentially, this technology can be used for a wider range of environmentally challenging chemicals, enabling our wastewater treatment plants to purify the effluent water even more – to the benefit of the environment as well as our drinking water,” Mads Koustrup Jørgensen finishes.