[CheeseFromLidl]

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?

[LorenPechtel]

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?

[zdragnar]

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.

[gucci-on-fleek]

> It's still nasty stuff

I've only ever personally used DMSO in chemistry labs, but Wikipedia [0] makes it look pretty safe: it claims that it has a higher LD50 than ethanol and that it's been FDA approved for human usage, so I wouldn't call it nasty. Now, I wouldn't really want to drink it because the side effects and taste sound pretty unpleasant, but it appears that it would be safe to do so.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_sulfoxide#Toxicity

[zdragnar]

DMSO readily absorbs through your skin, meaning it is a great carrier for pretty much anything else that you don't want in you.

At the scale of "washing tons of soil to remove DDT" it'd be quite unfortunate if something went wrong and tons of DDT tainted DMSO got dumped into the wild.

[LorenPechtel]

Yeah, for anything that will dissolve in DMSO, but DMSO doesn't dissolve teflon. It can't grab the halogenated bonds.

[potato3732842]

>Why am I thinking scam?

It seems scam adjacent because a high proportion of other stuff written in the same tone by the same types of people is a scam. The researchers don't write these puff pieces generally and the people that do spend the rest of their day writing "not technically a lie" type inflated corporate newspeak puffery that are basically "we're actually doing the customer a factor by charging more for less" tier lies.

It's also not unlikely that the experts involved provided a list of possible use cases and "making benzene from 3rd world dirt" was way down it and they had no idea the writer would lead with it.

[coryrc]

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.

[worthless-trash]

I guess it'd be a good time to add some bacteria and life back into the soil that in a controlled manner.

[talkingtab]

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?

[jjk166]

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.

[pkphilip]

It could be used to decontaminate open water bodies as well as ground water. We have ways of producing electricity cheaply enough these days and so using that electricity to perform electrolysis makes sense - - even if it needs to be done only during times of the day where there is good sunlight.

[lrasinen]

Way more than a foot, but that's the general idea.

There's a soil remediation project near my workplace (former railway depot). They've dug up several meters deep by now.

[awakeasleep]

I think itd be meant for the facility that uses the halogenated compounds in the first place, integrated into their process.

[CheeseFromLidl]

  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*