Engineered material uses light to destroy PFAS, other contaminants

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://water.rice.edu/news/current-news/engineered-material-uses-light-destroy-pfas-other-contaminants

Dec. 16, 2025

Materials scientists at Rice University and collaborators have developed a material that uses light to break down a range of pollutants in water, including per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, the “forever chemicals” that have garnered attention for their pervasiveness.

The process involves the use of a class of materials known as covalent organic frameworks, or COFs, whose porous structure ⎯ and hence high surface area ⎯ make them useful in light-driven, or photocatalytic, reactions. When they interact with light, some of the electrons in COF molecules get displaced, forming holes, and this bifurcation of charges is what makes COFs good photocatalysts.

According to a study published in Materials Today, the Rice team grew a COF material directly onto a two-dimensional film of hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), giving rise to a hybrid supercleansing surface that needs only light in order to cut through tough pollutants, including pharmaceutical waste, dyes and PFAS.

“By combining two safe, lightweight materials in a new way, we built a powerful pollution-fighting surface that works quickly, works on many different pollutants and does not rely on metals that could harm the environment,” said Yifan Zhu, a postdoctoral researcher in Rice’s Department of Materials Science and Nanoengineering and a first author on the study. “This matters because it offers a cleaner, cheaper and more sustainable way to protect our water.”

…

Yifan Zhu, Yuren Feng, Yunrui Yan, Zhiyu Wang, Xiang Zhang, Somayeh Faraji, Qing Ai, Tianyou Xie, Xintong Weng, Lixin Zhou, Tianshu Zhai, Yifeng Liu, Xiaochuan Huang, Chen-yang Lin, Sarah Glass, Bongki Shin, Yimo Han, Angel A Martí, Pulickel M Ajayan, Mingjie Liu, Qilin Li, Jun Lou, Covalent organic framework/hexagonal boron nitride heterostructure photocatalysts for efficient degradation of emerging contaminants, Materials Today, Volume 91, 2025, Pages 253-260, ISSN 1369-7021, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mattod.2025.11.004

[LonePirate]

1. I hope these become mass produced and economical for every water treatment and discharge facility across the globe.

[NNadir]

2. University Press Releases are so fun. If one enters the terms MOF, PFAS degradation and gamma radiation one gets...

...more than 3,000 hits in 0.13 seconds, substitute UV, and one gets 4,000 hits, again in 0.13 seconds, and visible light, close to 7000 hits.

Many MOF's (metal organic frameworks) are commercially available.

Pretty much every issue of Environmental Science and Technology has a few articles on the topic. In a year, I might come across close to 100 papers on the topic.

Here's a post I wrote referencing one sometime ago: Ecological Risk of Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA) Degradation Products.

Here's another post wherein I discussed the topic: The Effect of Brine on the Radiation Driven Near Complete Destruction of "Forever Chemicals"

The world supply of boron nitride, which is produced at very high temperatures - and no, the closed Ivanpah solar facility will not produce these temperatures for boron nitride synthesis - is on the order of 300 metric tons.

One would think, given the thousands upon thousands of scientific papers written on breaking one of the strongest carbon bonds known, that to fluorine, all these "breakthroughs," we'd be saved, but we haven't been and we aren't.

Credulity is itself a problem.