Wait up. They propose to convert DDT trapped in the soil to benzene trapped in the soil? Is not benzene also a toxic and persistent soil pollutant (it is) where the typical remediation is to excavate the bad soil and landfill it? (it is)
Yes, they are leaving it in the soil. Prove me wrong with data. It says nothing at all about extracting the waste benzene they created from the soil, neither in the linked article nor in the complete paper, which i did read. The paper specifically describes an in-situ process. If it were economically beneficial to extract benzene from contaminated soil for industrial use, we would already be doing that with the tens of thousands of existing benzene contaminated sites, not creating more of them.
I can't find the 2025 which this article is supposed to be improving upon that work?
Or are we just resurfacing 2021 work all together?
[Edit]
Yes that is the 2021 paper, but this new announcement is supposed to improve that process but I can't find any sort of paper other than the Spark Award 2025 announcement[0]
The DDT is soluble in DMSO, so it is already possible to separate from soil.
The problem has been that the DDT isn't really useful, so you're still left over with DDT tainted DMSO. Hence, most cleanup efforts focus on sequestration of soil.
The electrolysis step creates benzene and other hydrocarbons, making a useful byproduct. This means there's a better incentive to treat it rather than store it.
Benzene is far more degradable than DDT. In fact the primary reason benzene causes cancer is because the human liver can metabolize it, producing the reactive carcinogen oxepin. It doesn't always degrade fast enough to prevent toxicity to humans or animals, but it doesn't last forever.
How does this work on a practical level? Do you scrape the soil to a depth of a foot and submit it to electrolysis or is the soil washed and the sludge then processed? How many grams of halogens does this recover per square acre of contaminated site? Does this sterilise the site?
It sounds like it could be used to decontaminate a waste stream, but how do you select out the offending materials from a site?? What magic breaks halogenated bonds while leaving others (which are easier to break) alone? And how does the solvent work?? Remember, teflon only became practical when they found a solvent for it--and it's the solvent that's the real problem. Teflon is non-reactive enough for the body to pretty much ignore, the solvent (which of course isn't 100% removed from the final product) has one reactive spot and is a problem. They've tried to hide behind a game of musical chairs, using "different" solvents, but the dangerous part of the molecule is unchanged as that's what's needed to do it's job. A longer or shorter inert tail makes it "different" from a legal standpoint, not meaningfully different from a toxicity standpoint.
DMSO is a pretty common solvent. It's still nasty stuff, but easy to clean from a sample.
Take a bunch of contaminated soil, wash with DMSO, filter out soil, wash again, take all of that and electrolyze it.
Take the soil, dilute with lots of water and boil in a chamber with a fractionating column / distillation setup to reclaim the last of the DMSO.
I'd be surprised if this was in any way economical, but it's the cheapest way to permanently get rid of DDT, and the production of benzene and other hydrocarbons is a nice side benefit to reclaim some of the cost.
Today we scrape however many meters deep of soil and haul off to a landfill. I assume you'd scrape it up, run it through something to pull out everything bigger than a pebble. Wash the pebbles, the rinse water goes with the soil through the cleaning process.
Certainly what comes out of the machine will not be living.
The real practical and immediate help would be ground water contamination. How many bad chemicals now permeate the water supplies around farming communities. Can this be used to treat the drinking water supply?
The soil is mixed with water to create a slurry which is then passed through filtration units which are sensitive to particular chemicals. Now the soil is fine but your filtration media is highly contaminated.
a process that can be used *on site* to render environmental toxins such as DDT and lindane harmless and convert them into valuable chemicals – a breakthrough for the *remediation of contaminated sites*
This looks very promising! Efficiently dehalogenizing toxins, preserving their carbon "skeletons" to be repurposed for valuable (nontoxic) industrial chemicals, creating NaCl (table salt) as a byproduct... seems full of win to me. Here's hoping...
Benzene is quite toxic. The EPA classifies benzene as a known human carcinogen for all routes of exposure. And their method leaves it buried it in the soil. It is not a valuable industrial chemical when it is in the soil, it is a pollutant.
Benzene is toxic, but it still has industrial uses. From the article:
> The reactor used by the researchers consists of an undivided electrolysis cell in which dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) is used as a solvent
They remove the DDT from the soil into the solvent (itself quite unpleasant). From there, it's pretty easy to filter out the soil and clean it up. Add water and boil or freeze dry to extract it back out, preferably capturing it to be reused.
> From there, it's pretty easy to filter out the soil and clean it up.
"Cleaning" soil is an interesting concept. At what point does it just become dirt? Presumably some of the nutrients will remain, but it seems like this would sterilize it.
Dirt still has use, of course, but soil is expensive to produce for a reason.
This article doesn't link to the primary research. It's referencing a Spark Award granted this year for work from 2024 and 2021. Here are the relevant articles:
Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) are highly recalcitrant and toxic compounds that pose a profound threat to ecosystems across the world. One of the most notorious representatives of this class of chemicals is hexachlorocyclohexane (HCH) – a known human carcinogen – a specific isomer of which was used as the insecticide Lindane.
...
In 2021, the groups of Morandi and Waldvogel disclosed a vicinal dihalide shuttle reaction under electrochemical conditions, with which HCH could be fully dechlorinated. In the present work, instead of transferring chlorine to another molecule, we sought to sequester it as an innocuous inorganic chloride salt, which is preferable for large-scale application.
Here's the free-to-read Accepted Manuscript version of the earlier 2021 publication:
"Merging shuttle reactions and paired electrolysis for reversible vicinal
dihalogenations"
Uses DMSO (by-product of paper production processes) as solvent. It's pretty nasty. All industrial processes wind up with nasty, and this may be swapping a less tractable and nastier problem for a well understood DMSO handling problem.
DMSO is a solvent that is is absorbed directly through the skin. Jello Biafra was wrong though, if you mix it with lemon juice and pour it on your hand, you will not sense the taste of lemons in your mouth. You will taste garlic. Try it and see.
When I worked for Bill Atkinson's sister, Dr. Kathy Atkinson, at UCR in high school, I was involved in a DMSO leak. Dr. A. was a microbiologist, but botanists worked upstairs. I guess DMSO is used a lot in botany, and they let an experiment boil over and DMSO got into the HVAC air return and then into the whole building. Smelled like garlic, and I turned bright pink. We had to evacuate. I also tasted garlic for a day or so. Nowadays you have to be 18 to get a job in a UC Lab.
You could get DMSO and ketamine at the vet supply store back then in the 80s. I heard of people ingesting acid via DMSO in that time frame, but it could have been an urban legend. It was a horse area and DMSO was used with horses to get stuff deep into their legs or something like that.
Back when diclofenac + dmso was rx-only and crazy expensive I tried making my own formulation with ibuprofen and dmso for back pain hoping it wouldn’t tweak out my stomach. According to what I read, ibuprofen would be very well absorbed with dmso.
After applying the ointment I got an upset stomach in minutes so yeah…. It was well absorbed.
PFAS contamination is one of those problems that seems insurmountable given how persistent these chemicals are. The fact that electrolysis can break down the carbon-fluorine bonds is genuinely exciting.
What's particularly interesting is the potential for on-site remediation. Traditional methods often involve excavating contaminated soil or pumping and treating groundwater indefinitely. If this can be scaled cost-effectively, it could transform cleanup efforts at industrial sites and military bases.
The key question is economic viability at scale. Energy costs for electrolysis can be significant, and PFAS contamination is often widespread. Would be curious to see lifecycle analysis comparing this to current remediation methods.
Dr John Todd has figured out and demonstrated a method to remediate DDT-contaminated water without the use of electrolysis, or other energy inputs. He was able to decontaminate one of the top superfund sites. The method is broadly versatile, and requires even lower tech than electrolysis. His methods can also sequester heavy metals. It involves introducing organisms across all of the kingdoms so that they self-organize on the contaminant.
More narrowly, Paul Stamets has worked a lot on mycroremediation — remediating with fungi.
>Dr John Todd has figured out and demonstrated a method to remediate DDT-contaminated water ... It involves introducing organisms across all of the kingdoms so that they self-organize on the contaminant.
Biomimicry, not invention. He reasoned that the DNA is a vast library for transforming molecules from one to another, and therefore, ecosystems are capable of breaking down pollutants.
In practice, there are multiple vats. The first stage has algae growing, which sequesters the heavy metals. The next stages follow other kinds of ecosystems, such as organisms from swamps. He will mix samples from multiple ecosystems that normally don’t mix so that some kind of novel, self-organizing ecosystem can form around the pollutant.
Then it is measuring and monitoring the contaminants. With the superfund site, he was tracking presence of the top ten pollutants on the EPA list. However, he also shows how people can use much simpler, non-industrial tests — using samples from say, uncontaminated lake water nearby and use a microscope to see if the water being treated will kill those microorganisms. This allows for remediation to be executed by people who don’t have access to labs, but still need a way to test their water.
A much simpler version of this that follows the same design principles is capable of local, onsite treatment of ordinary black water.
Likely not what you’re describing, but this hypothetical is what came to mind.
Consider if organism A consumes organism B in a symbiotic way. E.g., organism B makes berries.
Then, we engineer A to seek out and consume DDT, perhaps by making DDT delicious or fragrant to A.
Unexpected consequence: organism B evolves to produce berries that are absolutely redolent with DDT.
This might happen centuries later, due to the DDT-phillic genes outlasting the presence of artificial DDT in the environment, or it could happen much sooner, or it might never happen. Hard to know. “Life finds a way.”
Before reading the article, I guessed the headline was alluding to the popularity of Hypochlorus Acid as a sanitizer, made from electrolysis of slightly acidic salty (NaCl) water. I had a kid and the algorithm led me to discovering a brand of in-home electrolysis generators, and after a fair bit of research on safety and efficacy I’ve been using it quite a bit.
short, sweet, got the zam.
for toxic waste sites (superfund), and
land fills this checks all the boxes.
Given that many of the older developed areas
that have contaminated sites are also building out solar power, and pushing electricity prices into the negative, I believe that this could be set up to run full tilt, when power was cheap, and idle
when it is expensive.
Wait up. They propose to convert DDT trapped in the soil to benzene trapped in the soil? Is not benzene also a toxic and persistent soil pollutant (it is) where the typical remediation is to excavate the bad soil and landfill it? (it is)
https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/gama/do...
There was an old lady who swallowed a fly, she didn’t know why.
They're not leaving it in the soil. The benzene is extracted as a useful byproduct.
Yes, they are leaving it in the soil. Prove me wrong with data. It says nothing at all about extracting the waste benzene they created from the soil, neither in the linked article nor in the complete paper, which i did read. The paper specifically describes an in-situ process. If it were economically beneficial to extract benzene from contaminated soil for industrial use, we would already be doing that with the tens of thousands of existing benzene contaminated sites, not creating more of them.
It's in the article:
> The reactor used by the researchers consists of an undivided electrolysis cell in which dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) is used as a solvent
They move the DDT from the soil to the solvent, which is the medium for electrolysis, not the soil itself.
> neither in the linked article nor in the complete paper, which i did read.
I'm having trouble finding the paper, can you link please?
Courtesy of another poster down-thread.
https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/chab/organ...
Isn't this the 2021 paper?
I can't find the 2025 which this article is supposed to be improving upon that work?
Or are we just resurfacing 2021 work all together?
[Edit]
Yes that is the 2021 paper, but this new announcement is supposed to improve that process but I can't find any sort of paper other than the Spark Award 2025 announcement[0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcMTOI25yb8
The DDT is soluble in DMSO, so it is already possible to separate from soil.
The problem has been that the DDT isn't really useful, so you're still left over with DDT tainted DMSO. Hence, most cleanup efforts focus on sequestration of soil.
The electrolysis step creates benzene and other hydrocarbons, making a useful byproduct. This means there's a better incentive to treat it rather than store it.
So, you’re essentially washing the soil in DMSO, and DDT is more soluble in DMSO? — curious, what does it take to wash all that soil?
Benzene is far more degradable than DDT. In fact the primary reason benzene causes cancer is because the human liver can metabolize it, producing the reactive carcinogen oxepin. It doesn't always degrade fast enough to prevent toxicity to humans or animals, but it doesn't last forever.
DDT is still sprayed today, indoors, in Africa and Asia to control for mosquitos, including in India.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254251962...
How does this work on a practical level? Do you scrape the soil to a depth of a foot and submit it to electrolysis or is the soil washed and the sludge then processed? How many grams of halogens does this recover per square acre of contaminated site? Does this sterilise the site?
Yeah, this makes no sense.
It sounds like it could be used to decontaminate a waste stream, but how do you select out the offending materials from a site?? What magic breaks halogenated bonds while leaving others (which are easier to break) alone? And how does the solvent work?? Remember, teflon only became practical when they found a solvent for it--and it's the solvent that's the real problem. Teflon is non-reactive enough for the body to pretty much ignore, the solvent (which of course isn't 100% removed from the final product) has one reactive spot and is a problem. They've tried to hide behind a game of musical chairs, using "different" solvents, but the dangerous part of the molecule is unchanged as that's what's needed to do it's job. A longer or shorter inert tail makes it "different" from a legal standpoint, not meaningfully different from a toxicity standpoint.
Why am I thinking scam?
DMSO is a pretty common solvent. It's still nasty stuff, but easy to clean from a sample.
Take a bunch of contaminated soil, wash with DMSO, filter out soil, wash again, take all of that and electrolyze it.
Take the soil, dilute with lots of water and boil in a chamber with a fractionating column / distillation setup to reclaim the last of the DMSO.
I'd be surprised if this was in any way economical, but it's the cheapest way to permanently get rid of DDT, and the production of benzene and other hydrocarbons is a nice side benefit to reclaim some of the cost.
Today we scrape however many meters deep of soil and haul off to a landfill. I assume you'd scrape it up, run it through something to pull out everything bigger than a pebble. Wash the pebbles, the rinse water goes with the soil through the cleaning process.
Certainly what comes out of the machine will not be living.
The real practical and immediate help would be ground water contamination. How many bad chemicals now permeate the water supplies around farming communities. Can this be used to treat the drinking water supply?
The soil is mixed with water to create a slurry which is then passed through filtration units which are sensitive to particular chemicals. Now the soil is fine but your filtration media is highly contaminated.
I think itd be meant for the facility that uses the halogenated compounds in the first place, integrated into their process.
This looks very promising! Efficiently dehalogenizing toxins, preserving their carbon "skeletons" to be repurposed for valuable (nontoxic) industrial chemicals, creating NaCl (table salt) as a byproduct... seems full of win to me. Here's hoping...
Benzene is quite toxic. The EPA classifies benzene as a known human carcinogen for all routes of exposure. And their method leaves it buried it in the soil. It is not a valuable industrial chemical when it is in the soil, it is a pollutant.
Benzene is toxic, but it still has industrial uses. From the article:
> The reactor used by the researchers consists of an undivided electrolysis cell in which dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) is used as a solvent
They remove the DDT from the soil into the solvent (itself quite unpleasant). From there, it's pretty easy to filter out the soil and clean it up. Add water and boil or freeze dry to extract it back out, preferably capturing it to be reused.
> From there, it's pretty easy to filter out the soil and clean it up.
"Cleaning" soil is an interesting concept. At what point does it just become dirt? Presumably some of the nutrients will remain, but it seems like this would sterilize it.
Dirt still has use, of course, but soil is expensive to produce for a reason.
This article doesn't link to the primary research. It's referencing a Spark Award granted this year for work from 2024 and 2021. Here are the relevant articles:
"SCS Foundation News and Announcements 2025"
https://www.chimia.ch/chimia/article/download/2025_885/2025_...
Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) are highly recalcitrant and toxic compounds that pose a profound threat to ecosystems across the world. One of the most notorious representatives of this class of chemicals is hexachlorocyclohexane (HCH) – a known human carcinogen – a specific isomer of which was used as the insecticide Lindane.
...
In 2021, the groups of Morandi and Waldvogel disclosed a vicinal dihalide shuttle reaction under electrochemical conditions, with which HCH could be fully dechlorinated. In the present work, instead of transferring chlorine to another molecule, we sought to sequester it as an innocuous inorganic chloride salt, which is preferable for large-scale application.
Here's the free-to-read Accepted Manuscript version of the earlier 2021 publication:
"Merging shuttle reactions and paired electrolysis for reversible vicinal dihalogenations"
https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/chab/organ...
Uses DMSO (by-product of paper production processes) as solvent. It's pretty nasty. All industrial processes wind up with nasty, and this may be swapping a less tractable and nastier problem for a well understood DMSO handling problem.
DMSO is a solvent that is is absorbed directly through the skin. Jello Biafra was wrong though, if you mix it with lemon juice and pour it on your hand, you will not sense the taste of lemons in your mouth. You will taste garlic. Try it and see.
https://genius.com/Dead-kennedys-dmso-lyrics
I’m not sure what happens when you mix it with LSD. Again, try it and see.
When I worked for Bill Atkinson's sister, Dr. Kathy Atkinson, at UCR in high school, I was involved in a DMSO leak. Dr. A. was a microbiologist, but botanists worked upstairs. I guess DMSO is used a lot in botany, and they let an experiment boil over and DMSO got into the HVAC air return and then into the whole building. Smelled like garlic, and I turned bright pink. We had to evacuate. I also tasted garlic for a day or so. Nowadays you have to be 18 to get a job in a UC Lab.
You could get DMSO and ketamine at the vet supply store back then in the 80s. I heard of people ingesting acid via DMSO in that time frame, but it could have been an urban legend. It was a horse area and DMSO was used with horses to get stuff deep into their legs or something like that.
Back when diclofenac + dmso was rx-only and crazy expensive I tried making my own formulation with ibuprofen and dmso for back pain hoping it wouldn’t tweak out my stomach. According to what I read, ibuprofen would be very well absorbed with dmso.
After applying the ointment I got an upset stomach in minutes so yeah…. It was well absorbed.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3141840/
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/drugs/21230-diclofenac...
PFAS contamination is one of those problems that seems insurmountable given how persistent these chemicals are. The fact that electrolysis can break down the carbon-fluorine bonds is genuinely exciting.
What's particularly interesting is the potential for on-site remediation. Traditional methods often involve excavating contaminated soil or pumping and treating groundwater indefinitely. If this can be scaled cost-effectively, it could transform cleanup efforts at industrial sites and military bases.
The key question is economic viability at scale. Energy costs for electrolysis can be significant, and PFAS contamination is often widespread. Would be curious to see lifecycle analysis comparing this to current remediation methods.
This does not treat PFAS.
Dr John Todd has figured out and demonstrated a method to remediate DDT-contaminated water without the use of electrolysis, or other energy inputs. He was able to decontaminate one of the top superfund sites. The method is broadly versatile, and requires even lower tech than electrolysis. His methods can also sequester heavy metals. It involves introducing organisms across all of the kingdoms so that they self-organize on the contaminant.
More narrowly, Paul Stamets has worked a lot on mycroremediation — remediating with fungi.
>Dr John Todd has figured out and demonstrated a method to remediate DDT-contaminated water ... It involves introducing organisms across all of the kingdoms so that they self-organize on the contaminant.
So... he invented the ocean?
Biomimicry, not invention. He reasoned that the DNA is a vast library for transforming molecules from one to another, and therefore, ecosystems are capable of breaking down pollutants.
In practice, there are multiple vats. The first stage has algae growing, which sequesters the heavy metals. The next stages follow other kinds of ecosystems, such as organisms from swamps. He will mix samples from multiple ecosystems that normally don’t mix so that some kind of novel, self-organizing ecosystem can form around the pollutant.
Then it is measuring and monitoring the contaminants. With the superfund site, he was tracking presence of the top ten pollutants on the EPA list. However, he also shows how people can use much simpler, non-industrial tests — using samples from say, uncontaminated lake water nearby and use a microscope to see if the water being treated will kill those microorganisms. This allows for remediation to be executed by people who don’t have access to labs, but still need a way to test their water.
A much simpler version of this that follows the same design principles is capable of local, onsite treatment of ordinary black water.
Likely not what you’re describing, but this hypothetical is what came to mind.
Consider if organism A consumes organism B in a symbiotic way. E.g., organism B makes berries.
Then, we engineer A to seek out and consume DDT, perhaps by making DDT delicious or fragrant to A.
Unexpected consequence: organism B evolves to produce berries that are absolutely redolent with DDT.
This might happen centuries later, due to the DDT-phillic genes outlasting the presence of artificial DDT in the environment, or it could happen much sooner, or it might never happen. Hard to know. “Life finds a way.”
> Dr John Todd
…who is this? This guy [1]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Todd_(Canadian_biologist)
That is the dude.
Before reading the article, I guessed the headline was alluding to the popularity of Hypochlorus Acid as a sanitizer, made from electrolysis of slightly acidic salty (NaCl) water. I had a kid and the algorithm led me to discovering a brand of in-home electrolysis generators, and after a fair bit of research on safety and efficacy I’ve been using it quite a bit.
Technically it solves contamination problems too.
short, sweet, got the zam. for toxic waste sites (superfund), and land fills this checks all the boxes. Given that many of the older developed areas that have contaminated sites are also building out solar power, and pushing electricity prices into the negative, I believe that this could be set up to run full tilt, when power was cheap, and idle when it is expensive.