TalkingPFAS Ep 49 Alison Ling (Ali) University of St Thomas, St Paul, Minnesota Costs of removing PFAS
Welcome back to Talking PFAS podcast and if you are joining me for the first time a very big welcome to you. I am a journalist and your host Kayleen Bell.
Last episode I brought you a discussion with Boston Attorney John Gardella from CMBG3 Law. This was a very informative chat about some PFAS developments in the US, and changes to the US EPA under Trump administration. Here is a little of what John had to say from Episode 48 where he is talking a change to the environmental justice law in the US.
“Under the Biden Administration there was a large initiative for something we call environmental justice, which is essentially that when enacting environmental laws or pursuing sites to clean up that consideration should be made to historically poorer communities and socioeconomic backgrounds, communities where there has been historically a lot of concentration pollution because they have been in an industrial area for example. And the environmental justice program in the US has been eliminated under the EPA, under the new Trump Administration.”
There is a lot of key information in that discussion with John Gardella and I encourage you to take a listen. I included that little portion from the last episode because in today’s discussion my guest and I will be talking about costs of cleaning up PFAS, and the need to reduce PFAS production.
My guest today is Alison Ling. She is an Assistant Professor in Civil Engineering and works in the Department of Civil Engineering, at the University of St. Thomas, at St Paul in Minnesota. Today we will be discussing a couple of her papers.
Here is a little preview from our discussion:
“When I first ran those calculations it comes out as millions of dollars per kg of PFAS that you remove from the environment and that is millions of dollars whether it is from wastewater effluent, drinking water, wastewater biosolids, soils. It is almost across the board millions of dollars per kilogram and I was just blown away by those numbers. That was way more than I was expecting. But the thought exercise I went through for this paper is if we keep making and emitting PFAS at the rate that we are emitting them right now, which is on the order of millions of tonnes per year, how much would it cost to remove them at the same rate? And so, if you have millions of tonnes of PFAS per year and it costs millions of dollars per kilogram of PFAS to remove it, if you multiply those numbers you get a number that is similar to or greater than the global GDP.” This is estimated to be around $106 trillion dollars.
I hope you enjoyed today’s discussion, I certainly did. If you have found value in the Talking PFAS podcast I would be really grateful if you would review and share the podcast so others can find it. Also please subscribe so you don’t miss an episode.
I will be back with one more feature episode before the end of the year. I will also be brining you a new product Talking PFAS News which will be a shorter episode 10-15 minutes about PFAS news in Australia and globally. I am now accepting expressions of interest from sponsors for the Talking PFAS feature and news episodes. This is open to remediation companies that are cleaning up PFAS and companies that have removed PFAS chemicals from their manufacturing processes and would like the public to know.
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Thank you again for listening see you next time.
LINKS mentioned in today’s episode.
“Estimated Scale of Costs to Remove PFAS from the Environment at current emission rates.”
Main webpage not open access/publicly available:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969724007861.
The full "pre-print" which has the same content is available through the SSRN here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4718530
“Is Removal and destruction of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances from wastewater effluent affordable.”
This one is open access, available here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wer.10975
“The Global Threat from the Irreversible Accumulation of Trifluoroacetic Acid (TFA) – ACS Publications” Hans Peter H. Arp, Andrea Gredelj, Juliane Gluge, Martin Scheringer, and Ian T. Cousins
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.4c06189
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