Episode 48: An Interview With Louis Lebrun, Axine Water Technologies

PFAS chemicals, often dubbed “forever chemicals,” have found their way into everything from our water supply to everyday products, raising concerns about their impact on health and the environment. New regulations involving these substances present new challenges for manufacturing in all areas, including surface finishing operations. In this installment of On the Line, PF interviews Louis LeBrun, vice president of sales with Axine Water Technologies, an industrial water and wastewater treatment company that specializes in an electrochemical oxidation technology named ElectraCLEAR that is designed to eliminate PFAS compounds.

PF: Describe how your ElectraCLEAR process works.

LB: Electrochemical oxidation sounds really complicated, but if you boil it down to its simplest form, we’re taking two reactive materials — conductive materials [typically metals] — and we immerse them into the process flow. Whether it’s a wastewater stream or however that process comes to us, if you put these anodes and cathodes in a solution and you pass an electric field between them (electrifying them), you will cause reactions to occur at the surface of the electrode. So, in the anode (the negative side) you will cause oxidation to occur by contributing or stripping electrons from a compound — and that’s the electrochemical oxidation step. So by choosing that material, we can drive the reaction pathway to achieve whatever treatment we’re looking for.

An everyday example of this reaction would be salt-chlorinated swimming pools. So, a salt swimming pool is just an electrochemical cell that uses what's ruthenium as a cathode, and it causes the salt molecule to split and form chlorine to chlorinate your pool.

ElectraCLEAR uses more exotic materials that enable really high reaction pathways, and that enable us to break the PFAS molecule. [The PFAS] is compromised and also subjected to other chemical reactions that are in the mix. We will sequentially strip off the carbons and the fluorines. It’s a really powerful process.

The big advantage to electrochemical oxidation is there are no byproducts. You can run this reaction until you literally step-by-step extract each carbon, each fluorine, until you destroy the compound all the way back to its elemental precursors. The byproducts from an electrochemical oxidation process are typically hydrogen gas, fluorine ions, carbon dioxide and some mineral salts — but there’s no other residual sludge or another chemical that needs to be added. It is a self-contained process, which makes it extremely simple.

The other advantage to electrochemical oxidation is it's extremely simple to operate because it operates at ambient temperature and pressure. There are a number of processes available right now, like incineration or pyrolysis, where you can thermally degrade a PFAS molecule — if adding enough heat and energy to almost anything the molecule eventually breaks apart. However, that is very challenging and energy intensive. Whereas, electrochemical oxidation is literally a pipe reactor. We pass the water through the reactor, we electrify the reactor, and by current controlling the materials in it and the amount of electrical current we apply, we can drive that reaction as completely or as slowly as we as we want. So it’s an extremely powerful and useful tool.

PF: What do finishing operations need to be aware of — what options are available as they work to comply with changing PFAS regulations?

LB: So right now, the state of the industry and the chemical properties of PFAS — and its family of compounds, which is about 3,000 compounds, by the way — requires a two-step treatment process. So, what most companies are currently doing is “removing PFAS,” and they’re doing that with activated carbon or ion exchange media, where they’re literally absorbing that [PFAS] molecule as it passes through a media bed and binding it on carbon or a media. The challenge with that is that media has a very finite life, it’s expensive and now you have a media that’s contaminated — it has very high concentrations of PFAS that you need to dispose of.

Right now, capture and removal is the option, because there haven’t been any destruction technologies. Destruction  — electrochemical oxidation — is step two of that process. We can take whatever is on that media — in many cases, extract it from that media — and now instead of disposing of it (which can create a long-term liability for a company to send it somewhere or even be a liability in the truck between the site and the nearest landfill). We can actually destroy that compound on site, completely eliminating it from the environment — and that’s a big deal.

PF: So, this solution can be used in tandem with things that finishers are already doing, correct?

LB: In many cases, that is correct. Normally, what we do is we try to concentrate the PFAS as much as possible before we go into our process — and that is because we are more cost-effective the higher the concentration PFAS you can send us. Then we would destroy that compound. The water that’s produced as a result of that, in many cases, is clean enough to be reused at the facility. It could be used for things such as cooling towers, or, in many cases, it can sent back to the head of the plant and then used in the process again. So, there’s a real opportunity for water reuse and additional savings.

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Listen to the complete interview in an episode of PF's On the Line Podcast: short.pfonline.com/OTL48