Technically it solves contamination problems too.
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.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254251962...
> 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.
"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.
https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/gama/do...
There was an old lady who swallowed a fly, she didn’t know why.
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.
> 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.
I'm having trouble finding the paper, can you link please?
https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/chab/organ...
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]
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?
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.
Certainly what comes out of the machine will not be living.
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*"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...
https://genius.com/Dead-kennedys-dmso-lyrics
I’m not sure what happens when you mix it with LSD. Again, try it and see.
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.
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...
More narrowly, Paul Stamets has worked a lot on mycroremediation — remediating with fungi.
So... he invented the ocean?
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.
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.”
…who is this? This guy [1]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Todd_(Canadian_biologist)