ORLANDO, Fla.— On a humid morning at one of the largest wastewater plants in central Florida, a tanker truck loads up with thousands of gallons of sludge—the thick, dark and heavy remnants of everything flushed or drained across the city.
But the Water Conserv II Reclamation Facility isn’t just processing waste. Plant operators are in the early stages of testing a technology they hope will solve one of the most persistent environmental problems of the times: PFAS contamination.
It’s a promising idea. But the optimism sits beside a complicated truth: chemicals called PFAS—short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances—are everywhere. They are stubborn, and ubiquitous in Florida’s wastewater systems.
PFAS: A Pollution Problem Decades in the Making
PFAS were designed to last.
Their backbone is the carbon–fluorine bond, one of the strongest in chemistry. That strength makes them great for waterproof jackets, nonstick pans, microwave popcorn bags and firefighting foam, but disastrous once they enter the environment.
They do not break down.
Not in soil.
Not in water.
Not even under the harshest chemical treatments.
Instead, they “bio-accumulate,” meaning they become part of life cycles in water, in sediments, in plants and animals and in us.
Nearly 60% of the 4 million dry metric tons of sewage sludge produced annually in the U.S. is spread on fields as fertilizer, according to the EPA in 2024. PFAS ride along with it. Once applied, these compounds can seep into groundwater, crops, cattle and ultimately people, creating an invisible loop of contamination.
The health risks are severe and well-documented by the EPA:
- reproductive and developmental harm
- weakened immune systems
- heightened cholesterol levels
- disruptions to hormone function
- and increased risk of cancers, including prostate, kidney and testicular
Two states, Maine and Connecticut, have already banned land application after PFAS were found in wells, dairy herds and farm soils. But Florida, which treats about 1.9 billion gallons of wastewater annually, has not yet taken similar statewide action. However, some communities around the Lake Okeechobee watershed have banned land application due to concerns around algal blooms and nutrient pollution.
Yet according to Alan Oyler, a project manager at the Conserve II facility, most Floridians still don’t know what PFAS are.
“In most instances, the general public has no idea about PFAS,” he said. “You have a very limited group of people who are familiar with it.”
Destroying PFAS with heat
Against this backdrop, the Conserve II team is starting to test a new way to process the sludge, called gasification. The tests represent a solution that has so far proven elusive: a potentially scalable tool to eliminate PFAS rather than store or spread them.
Gasification heats the biosolids until everything within them completely breaks down. It’s considered one of the most promising technologies and one of the few capable of breaking the carbon-fluorine bond that makes PFAS so persistent.
A handful of cities across the country are now testing these systems, including Orlando, where wastewater engineers are studying how gasification could provide a long-term alternative to land application.
Gasification exposes biosolids to temperatures far higher than those in conventional incineration, creating conditions that break down PFAS molecules into carbon and hydrofluoric acid, which can be easily neutralized.
Massive chambers heat biosolids to several thousand degrees in a low-oxygen environment, converting organic material into synthetic gas, or “syngas,” and leaving coarse, almost glass-like, sterile, carbon-rich biochar.
“At those temperatures, research has shown that you achieve destruction,” Oyler said. “Not just, ‘oh, we're going to make it disappear from testing because it's now a smaller molecule.’ No—it's that you have cleaved that carbon-fluoride bond and changed it to an inert material.”
Such systems offer several clear advantages. First, they destroy PFAS, neutralizing compounds that would otherwise persist indefinitely; PFAS are nicknamed “forever chemicals.” Second, gasification dramatically reduces the overall volume of sewage biosolids by 70 to 90 percent, shrinking disposal needs. And third, the synthetic gas generated can be captured and used as an energy source.
Interest in gasification continues to grow nationwide as states tighten PFAS regulations and residents become increasingly concerned about land spreading of biosolids. For many utilities, thermal destruction represents a path toward long-term compliance and, perhaps, the most direct method available to make sure PFAS aren’t forever.
As Oyler puts it, “I think you're seeing the future of what's going to happen over the next five years happening in Orlando today.”
Trapping PFAS
Two hours north, at the University of Florida, chemical engineering professor Joshua Moon is looking to address the PFAS problem as it enters wastewater treatment facilities.
Moon's team is working to develop a new class of solutions known as advanced polymer adsorbents. These materials operate like custom sponges. They are designed to selectively trap PFAS molecules on their surfaces and deep within an internal polymer network.
“You can flow water over the adsorbent or put the adsorbent in water, and then essentially the PFAS can bind to the surface of the gel, but it can also diffuse inside,” Moon described. “Some of our results have been quite promising.”
One of the challenges with capturing PFAS is that they are widely distributed and tough to neutralize. But Moon’s gels condense PFAS into a tight, concentrated mass, perfect for feeding into destruction technologies like gasification.
“It's very difficult to pull PFAS out of water because it's present at such low concentrations,” Moon said. “If you took food coloring and you diluted it and put a drop in a swimming pool, then your challenge is how do you get all of that dye back out? That's basically the concentration that we're working with for PFAS removal."
One of the technology’s benefits is that it’s reusable. Traditional adsorbents such as activated carbon and ion-exchange resins—found in your standard kitchen water filter— would typically be sent to a landfill or incinerated after a single PFAS soak. Moon’s polymer gels can be cleaned, reset and redeployed through multiple treatment cycles without significant loss of performance.
“You can essentially regenerate the adsorbent, remove all of the PFAS using an organic solvent and then you can actually reuse that multiple times.” Moon said. “We've done that up to three or four times in the lab with some cycles.”
By rinsing the polymer in an organic solvent like alcohol, you can send the alcohol off to be destroyed along with the PFAS and reuse the membrane to catch more PFAS.
Rinse, Repeat.
The path forward
As PFAS contamination becomes harder to ignore, Florida utilities are seeking solutions that are affordable and acceptable to the public–and truly get rid of the hazard. Orlando and UF represent two ends of a promising spectrum—one focused on destroying PFAS, the other on removing them from water in the first place.
Neither solution is perfect. Both come with a cost.
On the one hand, gasification is an expensive process, and that cost will be passed on to taxpayers in areas where it replaces land application.
On the other hand, PFAS-capturing gels are a long way from industrial-scale use, and much more testing will be needed before they can even be tested at a larger scale.
But together, they offer something wastewater managers haven’t had before: hope.
And for a state processing millions of gallons of wastewater a day, hope backed by science is a powerful thing.