Finally, A Possible End to PFAS Forever Chemicals - Dr. Brittany Trang

Dr. Brittany Trang recently made New York Times headlines with an experimental but extraordinarily promising method for turning dangerous "forever" chemicals called PFAS into different, harmless chemicals.

Dr. Trang is a 2022-2023 Sharon Begley Science Reporting Fellow at STAT News. Previously, she covered health and science at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Mass Media Fellow. Her freelance work has been published places like Chemistry World, Chemical & Engineering News, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

She has a bachelor’s in English and chemistry from the Ohio State University and a PhD in chemistry from Northwestern University, where she worked with Prof. William Dichtel to develop per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) remediation methods.

PFAS, a class of “forever” chemicals that don’t break down in the environment, are a common problem on military bases and other places where firefighting foam is heavily used.  As part of Climate Money Watchdog’s mission to investigate spending on environmental protection as well as climate change mitigation, we are tracking the $10 billion the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has $10 billion has allocated to addressing the PFAS problem, including $1 billion for advanced research.

Transcript

Gregory A. Williams: 0:10

Thanks, everyone for joining us for another episode of climate money watchdog where we talk about mostly federal expenditures that are designed to either mitigate climate, climate change or to otherwise protect the natural environment. Today, we're joined by Dr. Brittany Trang, who was the 2020 to 2023 Sharon Begley science reporting Fellow at stat news, and is previously covered health and science at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, as an American Association for the Advancement of Science, mass media fellow on her freelance work has been published in places like chemistry world, chemical and Engineering News and the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. She has a bachelor's degree in English and chemistry from Ohio State University, and a PhD in chemistry from Northwestern University, where she worked with Professor William dicto to develop per and poly flora. I always stumble over this PFAS remediation methods and I'll I'll leave it to Dr. Trang to get her mouth around that polysyllabic word. So tonight, we're going to be talking about those PFAS chemicals, so called Forever chemicals that are commonly used in in applications like firefighting foam. And once they enter the environment, they are very difficult to withdraw. And more importantly, they're, they're difficult to destroy. And so Dr. Chang's work focuses on cost effective and thorough means of breaking those chemicals down.

Dina Rasor: 1:47

This is Dina Rasor and I, I wanted to say a few I'm very impressed with what she's done already. And being a words about PFAS, and military bases, because I've been following them for years on military bases and things like that. And then there, when I finally had found out as I keep reading it, for the last, you know, 15 years that I've been looking at it occasionally, I get very, very concerned, because they keep talking about where they're finding it, you know, they're finding it in almost every cell of every animal and every human being in the United States, I mean, the world, it's all over the place, and you know, breast milk, the whole thing. And I was always just very depressed, because they kept saying it's a forever chemical, we don't have to get, you know, we don't have to break it down. So I'm like, you can't even mitigate stuff. There's no mitigation to do this. So I kind of felt like, Oh, we're doomed. And then I was very pleased to see Dr. Chang's work. preliminary work will make this very sure this is preliminary work. This is still in the lab, and everything else. But it's one of those things like when you find out that, you know, some cancer treatment works in the petri dish, you say, Oh, good, you know, let's at least there's hope that we can use this to stop because before we had nothing. So anyway, I wanted to welcome her and journalist myself very impressed. She's going into journalism. So welcome, and anything you'd like to add, before we start asking questions or something you want to say that I know you were kind of concerned that people think this is a done deal, as far as the technologies. So once you say a few words like that, this is just the one of the preliminary breakthroughs. Yeah, I also want to make clear that we are not the first people to destroy PFAS. There are lots of other people who have gone before and have developed different methods that perhaps we're going to talk about later. But there's a lot of different methods floating out there for PFAS destruction, and a lot of them have gotten to pilot scale, et cetera. So we're not the first boat we our work is a different approach than people have used previously. Is it like a simpler approach? In the sense that it that the other approaches have been more calm, more complicated technology, more expensive technology? I mean, you know, you're talking about boiling it with various, various things. And I was like, wow. And then what I got from the article that triggered this in New York Times is that it seems to be that everybody that they interviewed who's in the fields, like can't be that simple. You didn't even think it could be that simple. So why don't you start out with telling the story about how you know how, how you started approaching this when you were in your graduate studies and what happened and, and why? Why you didn't think it would work and your big breakthrough?

Gregory A. Williams: 5:08

Well, let's maybe build some suspense first by, you know, describe the monster for us why? Why is P fast? Something we want to prevent from getting into the environment and and why is it been such an intractable problem?

Dr. Brittany Trang: 5:22

Yeah, so these compounds were developed in the 1930s and 40s. And they were used to make things like classically, you know, Teflon pans, scotchguard, and other stain resistant things, firefighting foams, as you mentioned. And the reason that they're used for all these applications is because they have all of these carbon fluorine bonds, that's what gives them the name per and poly floral alkyl substances just means that there's a lot of carbon fluorine bonds. And these bonds are very thermally stable, they are hydrophobic, so they are water repellent, they are layer phobic, so they repel oil as well. And they don't really want to react with anything, which is why they're good for these nonstick, stain proof applications. And so that's what we've used them in so many different products, but kind of by design, they are hard to break down. That's why we're using them in firefighting foams, because they're like, won't break down, you know, in a fire. So the fact that they're really hard to break down means that once they go out into the environment, like once you've used a firefighting foam once you release wastewater from an industrial plant that is making Teflon or once you landfill a product that has PFAS in it like a pizza box, or a burger wrapper for paper straws, I learned recently how PFAS is in them. So once you landfill one of those things, then it doesn't break down and it will just kind of wash off and wash out of the landfill. So that's why they are so hard to get rid of because there aren't environmental mechanisms to break them down. And they don't break down in our bodies either. Our bodies aren't used to seeing carbon fluorine bonds and doesn't really have a mechanism to break those really an earth bonds. And that's why they start causing a lot of health problems. A study in the early 2000s found that over 98% of people in the United States whose blood that they tested showed measurable amounts of PFS. And that extended past all the different demographic barrier demographic bins that they tried to divide people into it was just pretty much everybody. And the map of PFAS contamination in the United States also shows this. The Environmental Working Group has an interactive map. I don't know if you are familiar with that. But it shows pretty much every site that has been tested for PFAs. Whether it's a military site, or like a municipal site, and how much PFS contamination there is, and I use these in my PowerPoints in graduate school. And I would have to refresh it every couple of months because there'll be more dots and more dots and more dots that came up every year. So they are environmentally and bio cumulatively pervasive, and they are everywhere. And they are linked to a lot of health problems as well, which is why they're really concerning to us. I think keep going on that if you want

Gregory A. Williams: 8:42

just to just to paint a picture for people, I mean, again, I bring up the application of firefighting foam. And just imagine an airport of any kind, where not only do you occasionally have to put out a live fire, but you need to train to be prepared to put out fires. And this involves spraying, you know, water that's full of PFAS in order to get it to foam up and and to cover the burning fuel and to put it out. And so unless an airport is very carefully designed to cumulate that that water and contain it and put it through some kind of treatment system. You know, it just enters the the environment without treatment.

Dina Rasor: 9:21

Yeah, also, you know, maybe you can explain to us the health complications because, you know, they're kind of profound and I appreciate if you could give us an idea of of the the depth and then the width of all the different things that can cause trouble with people in the human body. I saw a map of it, you know, thing and it was just astounding to me. Yeah.

Dr. Brittany Trang: 9:49

So I think the way that people are most familiar with this is maybe through the work of rob a lot, which was documented in the 2019 movie Dark Waters with Mark Ruffalo, if anybody has seen that, but in the late 90s, early 2000s robbed a lot. What a farmer called Wilbur Tennant told Rob a lot who was the grandson of one of his one of the women in his town. Hey, I'm your environmental lawyer, we have environmental problems in our town. Can you please help us like figure out how to get this company to stop poisoning our cows and us. And that started what it was eventually a whole set of lawsuits against Dupont. And in through one of those lawsuits that it was ordered that they had to do medical monitoring of the folks in this town in West Virginia. And through that years long study of medical monitoring, they showed that there is a probable link between exposure to this compound called ch or we more commonly call it PFOA or per fluoro octanoic acid today, and seven different diseases, including pregnancy induced hypertension, kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, ulcerative colitis and high cholesterol. Since then, there have been way more studies about how PFAS affect our health. And it's been linked to, for example, polycystic ovarian syndrome, different sorts of birth defects and decreased immune responses. So it's been linked to like not being able to respond very well to COVID COVID vaccines. And there are a lot more links that are emerging, the more we study this, one of the most damning evidences I think, is this, just a few months ago, the EPA released some new new health guidelines exposure guidelines. So these are not enforceable limits. But the the US used to be higher, and people kept arguing that the limit for PFAS exposure. So for like PFOA, for example, should be around one part per trillion. But the EPA released updated guidance, and their guideline for PFOA was four parts per quadrillion, which is basically a new unit that nobody in this field really uses, and is lower than what the EPA even admits that they can detect. So basically, if we can detect it, it is higher than this limit, because for a parser quadrillion is so low, that we don't have the technology to measure that low. So I think that that is one of the most, I guess, alarming signals recently about how little PFAS it takes to start triggering some of these health effects.

Gregory A. Williams: 13:05

Yeah, I want to emphasize that I want to emphasize the practical value of that. That that new set of guidelines, I can tell you that with a local airport, here in New York, I have attended hearings, where, you know, it seems like the the Air National Guard and the local municipality and the Air Force, are all working diligently on implementing various treatment programs, but they were obliged to work against the exposure limits then published by the EPA. And there are lots of local activists who were pointing out that emerging science was indicating that the exposure limits should be much lower. But essentially, when when you have a government agency that that's fulfilling out a public mandate, spending public money on something they have to do that according to the published guidelines. And so these new guidelines allow various projects underway actually take action on this new science. So what do you what do people do currently, to try to get rid of PFAS once they discovered contain it?

Dr. Brittany Trang: 14:27

Yeah, the two most common ways to get rid of PFAS currently are landfilling, which is, as I mentioned before, not ideal because, you know, you get rain it leeches out of the landfill. I recently learned that landfill liners are just basically tarps. They're just like pieces of plastic on the bottom of the landfill, which I thought that was incredible. I thought that there was more containment than that, but that makes sense why things would leach out of the landfill. And then also, the other common way to get rid of PFAS is to try to incinerate it. So especially when you are filtering out PFAS from water, the most advanced technology we currently have for that on a large scale is using activated carbon. So they'll use this activated carbon filter. It's kind of like charcoal, and you filter your water and then every year to seven years, 10 years, it needs to be replaced, and they'll truck it off to an incinerator where you basically burn off and micro pollutants off of it so you can reuse the carbon. And this works for most micro pollutants. But because P FOSS are so thermally stable, it needs temperatures that are way hotter than normal, and some incinerators are not equipped to reach those temperatures. Furthermore, they sometimes use these incinerators to incinerate firefighting foams that contain PFAS. And there's evidence I think in upstate New York, they found that this incinerator that was supposedly instead of writing a PFAS containing foam was actually just blowing it around the community, which the incinerator was located because they are finding it and soil in the surrounding area. So neither of these techniques are really ideal. But they're those are the best technologies that we currently have that we actually use on anappreciable scale.

Gregory A. Williams: 16:39

So, plenty of room for improvement.

Dina Rasor: 16:42

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it doesn't look like most of the containment. And, you know, even even now, when they have coal ash fields from coal, they line it with cement. They now making them line it with cement. So it's amazing to me that they just put down tarps anybody's ever put a tarp in their roof knows the water will find a way to get out of it. Okay, now that we've scared everybody and scared ourselves on how bad it how bad it can be, and it's a forever chemical, you know what I mean? Sort of like, who wants to work on this? Because it's forever, and it's in every place, and we don't, we can't even begin to mitigate it. Kind of tell us the story, which I find really fascinating about how, you know, how you took one little thread and pulled it in that really started doing it. So you surprised so many people in the field? Yeah, it surprised me. That's a good way to put it though, pulling on a thread and then finding out what happened.

Dr. Brittany Trang: 17:46

So our lab got into PFAS through making these cyclodextrin based polymers to remove micro pollutants, including PFAS from water. So that's how we started. And over the years, we kind of crept closer and closer to doing more PFAS work. So we started making filter materials that were specific for PFAS and trying to figure out how they worked. And over the course of my PhD, the field in general learned a lot about what makes a good material for filtering out PFAS from water. And the frontier kind of became, how do we get rid of them after we have filtered out because you would present our work and then the audience member would raise their hand and say, Oh, you say that these filters are reusable. So after you wash the filter, like what are you doing with the waste that the PFAS waste that you're collected afterwards? And we never had a good answer for that. So my adviser will tell and I kind of set out to figure out how to do this and will suggested that we look at decarboxylation. So for perfluorocarbon folic acids, which PFOA is one of those there are lots of different ones have different lengths and slightly different structures. But there are a really large class of PFAS. And we decided to focus on that and try to find a way to cut off the head portion of the molecule instead of focusing on the tail portion, which is what a lot of the other techniques that destroy PFAS focus on so incineration, you heat it up really hard to try to break these bonds that are very strong these carbon fluorine bonds. Other techniques that people have used are like with plasma or electrolysis or with ultraviolet light, or oxidants and reductants. So a lot of really harsh environments to try to just break these carbon fluorine bonds that don't want to react under any other circumstances. And high energy usage to sounds like yes, yeah, usually you have to have some sort of sustained high energy input However, instead of looking at that, as chemists, we kind of came at this from like a perspective of, you know, chemists know a lot of ways to make certain molecules react in a certain manner. That's like what organic chemistry is all about. And so we knew that there are a lot of different ways to decarboxylated carboxylic acids in the literature. And we'll found this preprint, which eventually turned into a science paper, where this team from the University of Alberta took different carboxylic acids, and they put them in a certain kind of solvent, and the solvent has a certain property that allows the carboxylic head to pop on and off of the molecule, which they used for a totally different purpose. But we'll looked at this and he said, Hey, do you think this would work for PFAS? And I was very skeptical at first, because I, I didn't think it made sense. Because basically, you just put it into this solvent and you heat it a little bit. And then then, like this part of the molecule just pops on and off. And I kind of thought that was ridiculous. And if people, if it was real people would have known this before, you know, 2020. But it turned out that that was correct. So there was more literature, from the EPA that showed that they had observed this with PFAS, this thing happening with the head would pop off of the PFAS molecule in analytical standards that the EPA was using. So they had documented that and we tried it in our lab, and it did work, which was very surprising. And then after we were able to get the head of this molecule pop off, we're left with the tail of the molecule, which has all the fluorines on it. And that's the part we really want to get at. So I spent a few months trying different, adding different things to the reaction to see if I can get it to the flooring, or to get the rest of it to fall apart. And what I eventually found was that adding adding sodium hydroxide, which is very common base, you would find it in like any high school chemistry lab. It's in lye, which is used to make soap or used to like give pretzels or really delicious crust, or in drain cleaner, so it's very common. And adding that to the reaction made the PFAS, like a florist tails basically just disappear, which was highly unusual, but great. So we kept doing this disruption and find it Yeah, okay, like, basically all the flooring disappear, they go to fluoride, which is exactly what we want, like 90%, we can collect 90% of the fluoride floorings afterward as fluoride, the rest of it is in a small molecule called tri fluoro. acetate, which is very tiny PFAS. But that will degrade if you keep running the reaction longer. So basically, it just takes our PFOA PFAS, and brings it right down to what we call mineralization, where you can isolate the fluorine as fluoride. But we were really confused as to how this was happening.

Dina Rasor: 23:22

And though and those those chemicals that you're talking about, aren't nearly they aren't very dangerous and destructive, you know, the word you're not, you're not putting it in the form of another chemical that's, you know, what do you do with it now? Filters and putting it in the air? So this kind of just disintegrates it from my my understanding of, you know, pulling all the chains apart. When when you went to talk to the your peers in the in group and everything, did everybody say that this can happen? Or did you guys have this aha moment? Or was it a big human interest? Was it everybody in the lab? And you said I did it? I did it, you know, or what did it? You know, how was it accepted by your team? And your professor, and I'd like you to say his name again. So he get the credit. I don't think we talked about him in the beginning. And the rest of the people in your field react to that once you got to that point?

Dr. Brittany Trang: 24:25

Yeah, um, I think there were mostly just thrilled that it worked, that we found something that works because research, you know, 90% of the time is stuff that doesn't work. And it was incredible that it worked and that it was so simple, and it was very clear what was happening. Because we were able to monitor this by NMR nuclear magnetic resonance, which is like the basis for MRI, but we use it in chemistry and a little bit of a different way. Which is like a technique that not all lot of people use people are usually using mass spec to look at PFAS. But we're running this, again in a more organic chemistry sort of way. And we're able to use NMR, which allowed us to really look at the structure of what was in there and where it was going. And it was very, the evidence was very clear that this was clearly what was happening. I forget what else Oh, oh, yes. You asked. What professor's name? Liz. Yeah, I worked with Professor will detail. And, yeah, I think we were not so much skeptical as just really thrilled that it was working. But also befuddled as to how because again, it didn't make sense. But we could clearly see the evidence that it was working. And I feel like everybody has like a fear that their chemistry like, only works because, you know, the moon was like it was a full moon. And because like you didn't breathe on it incorrectly. But thankfully, like this chemistry was so robust that I had done it like literally hundreds of times, and it turns out the same pretty much every single time. So like I know, it wasn't because you know, the stars were aligned correctly that it worked.

Dina Rasor: 26:24

I also saw that when you in the in your paper you collaborated with people in China and people in Canada. How did that all come about?

Dr. Brittany Trang: 26:33

Yeah. So when we were so befuddled as to what was happening, we tried to as chemists with a push electrons. So we tried to look at the mechanism of how can we get from, like we see a we see the starting material, and we see B we see the product, but how did we get from A to B. And so we started to try try to figure out like, what's the pathway that we followed to get here that lines up with all of our observations, and we weren't able to do it. So we came up with some proposals, and we gave them to Ken Hoch, who's at UCLA, he studies computationally how different reactions occur, the different mechanisms for organic reactions, and the undergrad he was working with was Uli Lee attending university whose co first author with me on this paper, and Julie was fantastic. He took our incoherent scribbles and told us this will not work like I did the computation. And this is not possible what you drew here, but I came up with an idea. And the calculations indicate that this is actually possible. And so we went back and forth with you, Lee and can help. And Josh on sway at Shanghai Institute of organic chemistry, went back and forth with them saying, okay, maybe is this happening? And they would do the computation? They do the calculation and say, oh, like, that is not energetically possible. But maybe this is possible. We think that this might be happening, can you look for this, like piece of evidence? And then we would do the experiment? And we would look for that piece of evidence? And we say, Oh, yes, we do see that. And then we'd come up with something else, like, oh, we detected this byproduct? How, like, what is something that can explain that? And then they would go and propose some different pathways and calculate whether they were possible and tell us Oh, like, this is how that happens. So we went back and forth, with these little bits of evidence that we had. And so it was a really great collaboration to see both our and their hypotheses being affirmed, as we tried to figure out what was going on.

Gregory A. Williams: 28:54

Let me just check my understanding what you're describing. So it sounds like very early on, you were able to combine different materials in an experiment and get favorable materials to come out. But that doesn't explain exactly how those when those chemicals mixed together as so. Let me see if I can remember my my high school chemistry, this the difference between mixtures and compounds, you know, physical reactions versus chemical reactions to have a chemical reaction, different chemicals need to come out different chemical compounds. And for that to happen.different atoms within the the molecules need to exchange electrons so that their two atoms are no longer bonded to each other, but they're bonded through a different combination of atoms. And you were seeking to explain on a step by step basis, which of those bonds broke and then formed new bonds. And that's way beyond just putting chemicals in a pot stirring them and seeing what chemicals come out. It's the How to couple, you know the what came out? Experiment?

Dr. Brittany Trang: 30:11

Yes, that's a very good way to explain it. And that is the part of the study that is like less flashy, but more exciting to scientists, I would say. Because it's very hard to study these intermediates, it's very hard to find evidence for what pathways P FA destruction is going through. People have tried to do it before somewhat, but mostly said, oh, like these are transient, like we can't observe them. So like, we're going to propose something. And then we're not going to do any experiment, or anything to like, affirm whether this is possible or whether this is actually happening. So that's one aspect of our study that was really different, that we were able to track down this mechanism. And we also discovered, so in the course of figuring out what reactions were happening, what bonds were breaking and being formed, we found out that the pathway that we are going through is actually actually super low energy barrier. So there are some steps that basically have no energetic barrier, they happen instantaneously by themselves, and instead of needing extra energy to put into them. So that allowed us to actually, once we pop off the head of the molecule, that's actually the most energy intensive part. And after that, everything can happen. I think it would happen to ambient temperature, but we the lowest temperature we conducted it at was 40 degrees Celsius, which as somebody told me is the temperature of a hot yoga room. So not too hot in the grand scheme of things, so that is really surprising that the fluoridation part of this can occur at not very elevated temperatures. So you're not incinerating it as hot as an incinerator can go to break the carbon fluorine bonds, we've discovered a pathway that if you can get to a certain intermediate and reacted a certain way, then the carbon fluorine bond breaking can occur at basically, basically ambient temperature and definitely at ambient pressure.

Dina Rasor: 32:29

Okay, so So what's what's next? You know, you you, when we first approached you, you said, Well, you know, there's other people doing things. And this is very preliminary. And yeah, you can do it in the lab, and everything else, but what, what efforts and breakthroughs that your team and the people have been working on it, since I know now you've moved on to working on a reporter but the people that now that you've passed the baton, you know, what's next to finally try to make it practical, and it's feels like an overwhelming problem, because it's everywhere. So where would you decide? Would you decide at the point of where it actually gets into the environment to break it down? Or would you be able to get it out of soil and water? And how would you do that?

Dr. Brittany Trang: 33:21

Yeah, so I guess there are a lot of different parts to that question. But the first thing to know is that there's a very glaring omission, when you talk about using our method to practically destroy PFAS, and that's that our method is specific to perform carboxylic acids, we were able to expand it to the perfluoroalkyl, either carboxylic acids. So Gen X, if you've heard of that one is popular replacement for PFOA, that is also a huge pollutant. So we're able to destroy Gen X with this method. But it does not work on peripheral sulphonic acids, so P FOS or p FHX. S, if you've heard those, those are maybe even more common, especially in firefighting foams, than perfluorocarbon, folic acids, and there are another The other really large subclass of PFAS. So the first thing that has to happen is we have to be able to generalize this method to the sulphonic acids. So that means finding basically another way to cut off the head group of those molecules could sit different headgroup. And we'll need some different conditions to be able to cut those off. But once that happens, we are really confident that they will be able to just learn it the exact same way. I was at a conference recently and my advisor will detail he said in his presentation that he would bet his paycheck that they would degrade the exact same way once you were able to cut off the head of that molecule. So That's the first thing that has to happen. And then after that, to get to implement our method on an industrial scale has several other challenges. I honestly don't think that this is a method that will eventually get used. First of all, there's this dimethylsulfoxide solvents that we're using, which is a very common organic solvent, especially like drug discovery and organic labs. But it's not super desirable to use industrially. And somebody would first have to optimize this process. And I think in the optimization of the process, we will learn a lot about the role that the solvent is playing. And if we can replace it with something else, which is probably the most desirable thing is to figure out how can we use maybe more water and less DMSO. And so I think that the method that might ultimately get scaled up might look totally different. So here again, this is where your discovery of the pathways, you know that the how it happens, lays the foundation for these advances. Yes, I think the most exciting thing and the thing that is probably more probable is that some other people who are have a different PFAS destruction method might read our paper and say, I wonder if we could optimize our process if some of these things are going on? Or other people might look at this and say, How can we design around these criteria? In a totally different system, I think that's what will probably happen is that the method that ultimately is most popular to degrade PFAS is going to be one of these other methods. But our work because we figured out some of the how of behind it might inform other people's work as they seek to either optimize existing methods or build new methods around, like maybe this load energy input kind of destruction method.

Dina Rasor: 37:08

Okay, well, so let's go back and back then is you think I know this is looking into the future. But do you think it would be easier to extract it from water or fracture from soil using this method?

Dr. Brittany Trang: 37:25

From water for sure. I soil extraction, I don't know very much about soil treatment, which is a totally different scale and a totally different area of PFAS and structure and research. But this method would probably be good for either waste streams. So it's like directly capturing it as it's coming out of a plant or after water has been treated and you have a concentrated waste stream of PFAS, either regeneration solution? Or, like if you have reverse osmosis, the concentrate for that from that?

Dina Rasor: 38:07

Okay. Okay, sorry about that. And so all right now, the new bipartisan infrastructure law is against 5 billion to reduce PFAS for small communities and 10 billion for the whole and mitigation effort. But they also plan to put a billion dollars into the research and is, is the team that's still working on the people that you put together for the paper? Are they still? Are they looking to get that kind of research money to advance go to the next stage? I'm sure the detail research group would love some of that federal funding. But I don't know where that funding is being appropriated. If it is going to NSF, or other sorts of grants that might fund academic work, or if it is going to agencies like the DOD and the EPA, not sure where that's going and if what specifically being funded by it, well, how much different is this funding now, which is, you know, a billion dollars versus the kind of funding when you first started this and doing this? You guys probably got a little bit of funding and other people you know, doing looking at it in a different way to get funding Do you was there very much funding before this infrastructure law passed? Um, there was some so the Department of Defense in particular is interested in this problem because they are a large polluter, especially through the military, the firefighting foams used on military bases. And once you know

Dr. Brittany Trang: 39:59

You know, I think it's closing in on this will eventually get regulated under probably CERCLA the Superfund law, and the DoD will be responsible for some amount of cleanup. So the DOD has been interested in this for some time. A couple years ago, there was, I think, an unrestricted fund from DuPont. That was, I think, through an NSF grant going to fund PFAS clean up research. So, which I think is good that industry is funding some of that, because it's ultimately their mess. So I think that the opportunity funding opportunities have increased and it's very expensive to do research. So obviously, any money that we can get as good but I don't know exactly where it's going.

Dina Rasor: 40:50

Are they have they really banned it from you know, yeah, that's always been the problem, too, is that you? You know, you know, it's bad. And now you're saying there's a new version of something that does the same thing, but it's also polluting? Are they you know, I was startled to find out they put it in dental floss. It's I mean, I have they is an industry is, is it like fluorocarbons they finally said, you just can't use them anymore. And you've got to stop and are how are the replacements also potentially health problem.

Dr. Brittany Trang: 41:25

So I think in 2006, people started phasing out PFOA from large scale industrial use, people stood still do use PFOA but as is on much smaller scale than it used to be. But that meant that people started industries just started using replacements. So I mentioned Gen X earlier, that was used in North Carolina as a replacement for PFOA. A few years ago, there was a paper in Science, from a team from the EPA, where they analyzed the soil in New Jersey and found that this particular company in New Jersey, had started using a new PFAS. They only knew because they found it in the soil and we're through a lot of labor able to identify what this new PFS was because a lot of these new PFS are confidential business information, they're not disclosed. I don't know if the TSCA has been amended to better control what sorts of compounds need to be disclosed, especially for healthproblem reasons to the EPA. But regulation of PFAS is of utmost importance as we go forward and will really dictatehow things move. So going back to the bipartisan infrastructure law, I'm extremely excited that they have put aside this funding for grants for small and Frontline communities, which will hopefully help those most directly affected those who are drinking bottled water and have been drinking bottled water for two years because they can't drink the water that's coming from their tap. But as you you're going to see when the EPA announces the national primary drinking water regulations for PFOA and P FOS, which should be coming any day now, they said it would come in fall 2022 We're gonna see that's gonna get very expensive very quickly to treat PFAS and every single municipalities drinking water. It Yeah, when it comes down to municipalities to you know, get their own, probably activated carbon filter filters and install those and maintain those, it's going to get very expensive. And that's why it's important to designate PFAS as I just gonna I was just going to ask it has the EPA recognize hazardous substances under circular the Superfund law, so that the avenue the government has some avenues to force that the replacements and things like that, are there's a polluters to pay for the cleanup. As of the time Yeah, problem? And are they starting to regulate that before it is yeah. Oh, It's impossible to regulate every single one, which is what for the horse gets out of the barn? Are they starting to say look, you know, if you've got any version of this or any new version, or that that had they tightened up the standards, that is what advocates have been pushing for for years now, last year on the content, what is it called the contaminant candidate list or candidate contaminant list? So this is like a master list of contaminants that the EPA may decide to regulate in drinking water. Last year, they released a new iteration and P FOSS were on there as a class, which means the entire family is covered because up until now, we've been chasing individual compounds and there are it depends on your account 4000 9000 12,000 compounds in this class industry is banking on. Because the chemical industry lobby is saying, you can't tell me that these two compounds have the exact same toxicity. So why don't you study each of the compounds, and you tell me exactly how toxic it is. That way we can make a while that's appropriate, because if this one is less toxic than the other ones, then we can have more of it. Which is, you know, a really great way to really prolong the regulation process. But we've regulated compounds by class before with PCBs. And hopefully, the EPA will do that, again. It is kind of debatable whether it will happen, we'll see what happens. But for right now, the approach that the EPA has taken is this compound by compound approach, which is kind of unfortunate, because we're only regulating some of them very slowly, and not all of them at once, which allows this quote, unquote, whack a mole to continue happening, where, you know, PFOA is causing a ruckus. So we're going to stop using that, but we're going to use Gen X instead. And then, oh, they discovered that Gen X is a problem. So we're gonna tell them that we're gonna face you know, we're going to, like, restrict our Gen X use. But secretly, we have developed another compound that nobody knows about, and nobody has standards for so nobody can measure it when they find it in the environment. So in order to stop that, we have to regulate them all, as a class, which is hopefully, on people's radar now, but I am, you know, not going to hold my breath about it. But it's also politically complicated. Yeah, it's sort of like saying, you know, when people talk about climate, and they talked about, well, we can, we can do carbon sequestration on it, so we can keep burning oil. And, you know, finally, Bill McKibben, who's famous climate guy, he had a thing that I told him, he should make it into a bumper sticker, he had an article was started said, the world's on fire, stop burning stuff.

Dina Rasor: 47:08

You know, doing CCS, which is another thing we're looking at, you know, you just, you're just putting a bandaid on it, and it's not going to be as effective as, so you got to take it out, burn it, capture it and put it back. First, you got to pump it out of the ground, take it, burn it, and then put it back onto the ground. Why don't you just leave it under the ground? And I think I would think that at some point. You know, I know there's a lot of industry problems, you could you could finally say no, you're not going to you know, and yes, we are going to put like on the cigarettes, little things this can kill you. And so I think I'm hoping we get to that point, because they are finding the you know, PFAS and like deep trenches in the Pacific, you know, you have to go down these research legs. And it's kind of a startling thing. And we really don't understand I don't think we understand sort of what it does to humans, but what is it doing to, you know, the flora and fauna of the world? And I And there hasn't been much research in that, is there an effect on the rest of the government?

Dr. Brittany Trang: 48:15

A lot of studies are conducted with animals. I know that zebrafish are a really popular model organism for PFAS. PFAS research, and there are increasingly more studies done in plants. And especially as it relates to food, like our when we grow crops in soil that has been contaminated with PFAS, or we put sludge that you know, we've taken from wastewater treatment plants, and we're using it as fertilizer and that has PFAS concentrated on it. Our like our carrots and rutabaga is taking up pee for us. And then we're eating those carrots and rutabagas and getting more PFAS and concentrated inside of us. So there's a lot of studies on that as well.

Dina Rasor: 49:09

So after all this grand adventure, you're going off understand to be do journalism. But I was wondering, you know, how does I mean, are you optimistic, guarded pessimistic that you what you were the the important thing that you did to help this is going to help solve the problem in the long term.

Dr. Brittany Trang: 49:31

I am optimistic. I think that looking back at where this country has come from, or like the world has come from in terms of we didn't know asbestos was bad. We didn't know that lead was bad. We didn't know that chlorofluorocarbons were bad and how much of we have done to stop the usage of those compounds and how much we have done to clean up our buildings and our water from these compounds, I think that we can do it for PFAS. And PFAS. You know, fluorocarbon chemistry is pretty young, I would say, you know, there weren't really fluorocarbons, before the 1930s, so less than 100 years old, and we've learned so much about them. And it, there remains to be a lot of things to learn about them. And but we are realizing now there's a lot of weight behind. Cleaning up PFAS, more and more people that I talk to, you know what PFAS is, which is both terrifying and great. And the beginning of my PhD, I had to explain it to every single person. And now people are like, Oh, I think I watched that movie, or Oh, I saw that on the news, or, Oh, my community struggles with that. Which is really sad to hear, but also good that, you know, now we're really aware of this problem, there's a lot of public support for figuring out how to fix this. And also, in the government, there's a lot of push to like, speed up the rate at which we are working on this problem. So I'm optimistic that things will turn around for the better, hopefully. But there's a lot of work to do

Dina Rasor: 51:20

Pretty, pretty heady experience for your PhD thesis, you know, a lot of people just do a PhD thesis, and it goes into the library. But this had to have a great, that's a certain amount of great satisfaction for you, for sure. And that seems like a great optimistic note to perhaps end on. Is there anything else you would like to tell us or Deena? Are there any other questions you'd like to pose? Go ahead. Brittany, is there anything else that you'd like that we haven't said that you'd like to say about this?

Dr. Brittany Trang: 51:54

Yeah, I think that we need to find ways to stop PFAS usage, and not use all of these methods that we and other people in this field are developing to destroy PFAS as an excuse, like you said, a band aid of people saying that, Oh, I can continue to manufacture these, I can continue to put these into the environment. Because we now have methods to clean it up. You know, the way that like, say plastic manufacturers are, you know, pushing recycling, even though very little plastic actually gets recycled. And we end up just having more plastic waste, because nothing is getting recycled and more of it just keeps getting produced. And we also need to find ways to hold polluters accountable and not force taxpayers to pay to clean up something that they did not really put into the environment and to force them to lobby to get their communities cleaned up. So I think that both of those things need to happen moving forward.

Dina Rasor: 53:09

Well, you should be I'm just I was just so thrilled when I read you read your article, because every little you know, I know other people are doing it. But the idea that you might be able to take the word forever out of this, it you know it out of this because so that we aren't stuck, you know, if you can't extract it, you can't protect people, you got stopped making it, but then it's already there. And so I was just a very impressed. I'm very impressed that you that you were doing it as your PhD thesis when I'm when I'm sure there's, you know, I've got scholarship scholars all over the world, scientists all over the world working on trying to do it. So.

Gregory A. Williams: 53:53

All right. Well, thank you very much for joining us tonight. This has been, I think one of our certainly scientifically most informative episodes yet. And we were going to continue to track your progress now as a journalist, and we hope to we hope we get to see you again one of these days.

Dr. Brittany Trang: 54:12

All right. Thank you so much.

Gregory A. Williams: 54:16

Thanks again.