Our mission at Aquagga is clear—we develop and deploy PFAS destruction technologies, to keep PFAS out of people and planet. Destroying PFAS reduces the global environmental burden, safeguards public health, and preserves the Earth’s capacity to sustain life. The more PFAS we eliminate, the more lives we help save.
Some have described the accumulation of PFAS in our shared environment as a global boundary threat. Because PFAS bioaccumulate, low-level chronic exposure can lead to an increase in certain health conditions over time, in the aggregate. Because many PFAS are perpetually stable under natural conditions, destruction is the only way to reduce the collective threat to public health.
At Aquagga, we often look to install our HALT technology at the end-of-pipe for industrial wastewater treatment applications. In many manufacturing processes, the use of PFAS cannot be avoided. We keep PFAS from entering the environment to begin with.
PFAS destruction should be thought of as a mass reduction effort. When we do our jobs, we will have destroyed as much PFAS as possible by mass. There are a few reasons for this:
This thinking leads us to the conclusion that we should aim to treat the most concentrated liquid waste streams as possible. We often advocate for PFAS concentration technologies to sit upstream of our HALT technology to maximize the amount of PFAS mass we can destroy.
Imagine starting with 1,000,000 gallons of contaminated water at a PFAS concentration of 100 ng/L. If we run all of that water through HALT and achieve 99% destruction, we successfully meet EPA MCLs. But in doing so, we’ve had to heat, pressurize, and chemically treat all 1,000,000 gallons—an enormous amount of water to process.
Now, instead of treating everything at once, we first concentrate that same 1,000,000 gallons down to just 1 gallon using technologies like regenerable resins, membranes, or foam fractionation. That single gallon now holds the same total PFAS mass, just at a much higher concentration (100,000,000 ng/L). Running that gallon through HALT and destroying 99% of PFAS destroys the exact same mass of PFAS as Scenario 1. The difference? We only had to heat, pressurize, and chemically treat 1 gallon of liquid instead of 1,000,000 gallons.
In both Scenarios, the same outcome is achieved from a mass perspective, but Scenario 2 is drastically more efficient and economical. The residual PFAS in Scenario 2 can be re-concentrated by the same concentration technologies in a closed-loop.
Ultimately, this leads us back to our mission. When we destroy a significant mass of PFAS, we keep that PFAS from ever entering the environment, protecting public health. Treating more concentrated liquids translates to more mass destroyed. Destroying PFAS indirectly saves human lives and reduces the eventual treatment burden on public drinking water systems. And that’s something to get excited about.
