[HN Gopher] Electrolysis can solve one of our biggest contaminat...
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Electrolysis can solve one of our biggest contamination problems
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 182 points
Date : 2025-12-30 18:08 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ethz.ch)
(TXT) w3m dump (ethz.ch)
| chrisweekly wrote:
| This looks very promising! Efficiently dehalogenizing toxins,
| preserving their carbon "skeletons" to be repurposed for valuable
| (nontoxic) industrial chemicals, creating NaCl (table salt) as a
| byproduct... seems full of win to me. Here's hoping...
| buildsjets wrote:
| Benzene is quite toxic. The EPA classifies benzene as a known
| human carcinogen for all routes of exposure. And their method
| leaves it buried it in the soil. It is not a valuable
| industrial chemical when it is in the soil, it is a pollutant.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Benzene is toxic, but it still has industrial uses. From the
| article:
|
| > The reactor used by the researchers consists of an
| undivided electrolysis cell in which dimethyl sulfoxide
| (DMSO) is used as a solvent
|
| They remove the DDT from the soil into the solvent (itself
| quite unpleasant). From there, it's pretty easy to filter out
| the soil and clean it up. Add water and boil or freeze dry to
| extract it back out, preferably capturing it to be reused.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > From there, it's pretty easy to filter out the soil and
| clean it up.
|
| "Cleaning" soil is an interesting concept. At what point
| does it just become dirt? Presumably some of the nutrients
| will remain, but it seems like this would sterilize it.
|
| Dirt still has use, of course, but soil is expensive to
| produce for a reason.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Well, cleaning in this case would be removing the
| remaining DMSO, which is probably not too desirable to
| have in your soil.
|
| Considering the existing DDT contamination, ending up
| with dirt that needs to be fortified with compost is
| hardly the worst trade-off.
| modo_mario wrote:
| This all sounds like it would be many manyfold more
| expensive than just digging it all up, gathering it all
| togheter and putting it into some quarry or so that doesn't
| let much if any seepage happen.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I don't think it is intended to be commercially viable on
| the basis of benzene production alone.
|
| Rather, it is a more permanent solution compared to
| sequestration, where the benzene production offsets the
| cost.
|
| If, as they plan, it can be done on-site, that would also
| eliminate transporting the soil and avoiding accidentally
| spreading it elsewhere, which is appealing as well.
|
| Sanitary landfills (the sort that prevent seepage) are
| not exactly cheap either, and pose an ongoing risk in
| that the DDT is always there, waiting to get back out.
| guenthert wrote:
| Render me surprised as there is no Na in DDT.
| CheeseFromLidl wrote:
| 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?
| awakeasleep wrote:
| I think itd be meant for the facility that uses the halogenated
| compounds in the first place, integrated into their process.
| CheeseFromLidl wrote:
| 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*
| coryrc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I guess it'd be a good time to add some bacteria and life
| back into the soil that in a controlled manner.
| talkingtab wrote:
| 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?
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >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.
| jjk166 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| philipkglass wrote:
| This article doesn't link to the primary research. It's
| referencing a Spark Award granted this year for work from 2024
| and 2021. Here are the relevant articles:
|
| "SCS Foundation News and Announcements 2025"
|
| https://www.chimia.ch/chimia/article/download/2025_885/2025_...
|
| _Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) are highly recalcitrant
| and toxic compounds that pose a profound threat to ecosystems
| across the world. One of the most notorious representatives of
| this class of chemicals is hexachlorocyclohexane (HCH) - a known
| human carcinogen - a specific isomer of which was used as the
| insecticide Lindane._
|
| ...
|
| _In 2021, the groups of Morandi and Waldvogel disclosed a
| vicinal dihalide shuttle reaction under electrochemical
| conditions, with which HCH could be fully dechlorinated. In the
| present work, instead of transferring chlorine to another
| molecule, we sought to sequester it as an innocuous inorganic
| chloride salt, which is preferable for large-scale application._
|
| Here's the free-to-read Accepted Manuscript version of the
| earlier 2021 publication:
|
| "Merging shuttle reactions and paired electrolysis for reversible
| vicinal dihalogenations"
|
| https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/chab/organ...
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| DDT is still sprayed today, indoors, in Africa and Asia to
| control for mosquitos, including in India.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254251962...
| user_7832 wrote:
| As an Indian... I had no idea. I've seen fumigation a lot right
| from childhood (kids used to run _after_ the fumigation man to
| inhale that fog), with that sweetish smell it had. Of course it
| 's possible it was pyrethroids... not like they don't cause
| allergic reactions either haha welp
| frontfor wrote:
| To clarify, it's not "Africa and Asia". Only India, South
| Africa, and Zimbabwe are still using DDT actively.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| The paper says a bunch of countries don't use DDT _for
| malaria control_ but it doesn 't say if they still use DDT in
| agriculture. They used to use it for pest control growing
| coffee
| hosh wrote:
| Dr John Todd has figured out and demonstrated a method to
| remediate DDT-contaminated water without the use of electrolysis,
| or other energy inputs. He was able to decontaminate one of the
| top superfund sites. The method is broadly versatile, and
| requires even lower tech than electrolysis. His methods can also
| sequester heavy metals. It involves introducing organisms across
| all of the kingdoms so that they self-organize on the
| contaminant.
|
| More narrowly, Paul Stamets has worked a lot on mycroremediation
| -- remediating with fungi.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Dr John Todd_
|
| ...who is this? This guy [1]?
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Todd_(Canadian_biologist)
| hosh wrote:
| That is the dude.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| >Dr John Todd has figured out and demonstrated a method to
| remediate DDT-contaminated water ... It involves introducing
| organisms across all of the kingdoms so that they self-organize
| on the contaminant.
|
| So... he invented the ocean?
| hosh wrote:
| Biomimicry, not invention. He reasoned that the DNA is a vast
| library for transforming molecules from one to another, and
| therefore, ecosystems are capable of breaking down
| pollutants.
|
| In practice, there are multiple vats. The first stage has
| algae growing, which sequesters the heavy metals. The next
| stages follow other kinds of ecosystems, such as organisms
| from swamps. He will mix samples from multiple ecosystems
| that normally don't mix so that some kind of novel, self-
| organizing ecosystem can form around the pollutant.
|
| Then it is measuring and monitoring the contaminants. With
| the superfund site, he was tracking presence of the top ten
| pollutants on the EPA list. However, he also shows how people
| can use much simpler, non-industrial tests -- using samples
| from say, uncontaminated lake water nearby and use a
| microscope to see if the water being treated will kill those
| microorganisms. This allows for remediation to be executed by
| people who don't have access to labs, but still need a way to
| test their water.
|
| A much simpler version of this that follows the same design
| principles is capable of local, onsite treatment of ordinary
| black water.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Likely not what you're describing, but this hypothetical is
| what came to mind.
|
| Consider if organism A consumes organism B in a symbiotic
| way. E.g., organism B makes berries.
|
| Then, we engineer A to seek out and consume DDT, perhaps by
| making DDT delicious or fragrant to A.
|
| Unexpected consequence: organism B evolves to produce
| berries that are absolutely redolent with DDT.
|
| This might happen centuries later, due to the DDT-phillic
| genes outlasting the presence of artificial DDT in the
| environment, or it could happen much sooner, or it might
| never happen. Hard to know. "Life finds a way."
| metalman wrote:
| short, sweet, got the zam. for toxic waste sites (superfund), and
| land fills this checks all the boxes. Given that many of the
| older developed areas that have contaminated sites are also
| building out solar power, and pushing electricity prices into the
| negative, I believe that this could be set up to run full tilt,
| when power was cheap, and idle when it is expensive.
| buildsjets wrote:
| Wait up. They propose to convert DDT trapped in the soil to
| benzene trapped in the soil? Is not benzene also a toxic and
| persistent soil pollutant (it is) where the typical remediation
| is to excavate the bad soil and landfill it? (it is)
|
| https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/gama/do...
|
| There was an old lady who swallowed a fly, she didn't know why.
| jjk166 wrote:
| They're not leaving it in the soil. The benzene is extracted as
| a useful byproduct.
| buildsjets wrote:
| Yes, they are leaving it in the soil. Prove me wrong with
| data. It says nothing at all about extracting the waste
| benzene they created from the soil, neither in the linked
| article nor in the complete paper, which i did read. The
| paper specifically describes an in-situ process. If it were
| economically beneficial to extract benzene from contaminated
| soil for industrial use, we would already be doing that with
| the tens of thousands of existing benzene contaminated sites,
| not creating more of them.
| irjustin wrote:
| > neither in the linked article nor in the complete paper,
| which i did read.
|
| I'm having trouble finding the paper, can you link please?
| buildsjets wrote:
| Courtesy of another poster down-thread.
|
| https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-
| interest/chab/organ...
| irjustin wrote:
| Isn't this the 2021 paper?
|
| I can't find the 2025 which this article is supposed to
| be improving upon that work?
|
| Or are we just resurfacing 2021 work all together?
|
| [Edit]
|
| Yes that is the 2021 paper, but this new announcement is
| supposed to improve that process but I can't find any
| sort of paper other than the Spark Award 2025
| announcement[0]
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcMTOI25yb8
| zdragnar wrote:
| It's in the article:
|
| > The reactor used by the researchers consists of an
| undivided electrolysis cell in which dimethyl sulfoxide
| (DMSO) is used as a solvent
|
| They move the DDT from the soil to the solvent, which is
| the medium for electrolysis, not the soil itself.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > A much lower Lindane-soil ratio of 1 w%, where Lindane
| was _extracted with the reaction solvent prior to the
| degradation_ , also afforded good yields for both benzene
| (76%) and dichloride (76%, Entry 4, Fig. 4D). This
| alternative _pre-extraction protocol_ acts as a further
| proof-of-concept which might help the design of larger
| scale remediation processes in which undesired soil
| contamination with electrolyte and Mn catalyst can be
| prevented. Interestingly, the large-scale feasibility of an
| extraction approach has been demonstrated by the successful
| treatment of ca. 70,000 tons of HCH contaminated soils in
| the Netherlands in a _full-scale soil washing plant_ ,
| which achieved HCH removal efficiency of more than 99.7%
| (42).
|
| Emphasis added
| zdragnar wrote:
| The DDT is soluble in DMSO, so it is already possible to
| separate from soil.
|
| The problem has been that the DDT isn't really useful, so
| you're still left over with DDT tainted DMSO. Hence, most
| cleanup efforts focus on sequestration of soil.
|
| The electrolysis step creates benzene and other hydrocarbons,
| making a useful byproduct. This means there's a better
| incentive to treat it rather than store it.
| sargun wrote:
| So, you're essentially washing the soil in DMSO, and DDT is
| more soluble in DMSO? -- curious, what does it take to wash
| all that soil?
| zdragnar wrote:
| Assuming it doesn't break down under electrolysis, the DMSO
| can be recovered, so you only use as much as you can
| process at a time.
|
| It is apparently used in some battery chemistries, so I'd
| expect losses to be pretty low if the equipment is set up
| well.
| scythe wrote:
| Benzene is far more degradable than DDT. In fact the primary
| reason benzene causes cancer is because the human liver _can_
| metabolize it, producing the reactive carcinogen oxepin. It
| doesn 't always degrade fast enough to prevent toxicity to
| humans or animals, but it doesn't last forever.
| ggm wrote:
| Uses DMSO (by-product of paper production processes) as solvent.
| It's pretty nasty. All industrial processes wind up with nasty,
| and this may be swapping a less tractable and nastier problem for
| a well understood DMSO handling problem.
| buildsjets wrote:
| DMSO is a solvent that is is absorbed directly through the
| skin. Jello Biafra was wrong though, if you mix it with lemon
| juice and pour it on your hand, you will not sense the taste of
| lemons in your mouth. You will taste garlic. Try it and see.
|
| https://genius.com/Dead-kennedys-dmso-lyrics
|
| I'm not sure what happens when you mix it with LSD. Again, try
| it and see.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Back when diclofenac + dmso was rx-only and crazy expensive I
| tried making my own formulation with ibuprofen and dmso for
| back pain hoping it wouldn't tweak out my stomach. According
| to what I read, ibuprofen would be very well absorbed with
| dmso.
|
| After applying the ointment I got an upset stomach in minutes
| so yeah.... It was well absorbed.
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3141840/
|
| https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/drugs/21230-diclofenac.
| ..
| tingletech wrote:
| When I worked for Bill Atkinson's sister, Dr. Kathy Atkinson,
| at UCR in high school, I was involved in a DMSO leak. Dr. A.
| was a microbiologist, but botanists worked upstairs. I guess
| DMSO is used a lot in botany, and they let an experiment boil
| over and DMSO got into the HVAC air return and then into the
| whole building. Smelled like garlic, and I turned bright
| pink. We had to evacuate. I also tasted garlic for a day or
| so. Nowadays you have to be 18 to get a job in a UC Lab.
|
| You could get DMSO and ketamine at the vet supply store back
| then in the 80s. I heard of people ingesting acid via DMSO in
| that time frame, but it could have been an urban legend. It
| was a horse area and DMSO was used with horses to get stuff
| deep into their legs or something like that.
| gucci-on-fleek wrote:
| > Uses DMSO (by-product of paper production processes) as
| solvent. It's pretty nasty.
|
| Copying my comment on another subthread [0] here:
|
| I've only ever personally used DMSO in chemistry labs, but
| Wikipedia [1] 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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46442253
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_sulfoxide#Toxicity
| ggm wrote:
| A solvent which is tractable for complex waste reduction, and
| skin absorbed and would presumably carry those contaminants
| into the body.
|
| But yea, I overrated it's nastiness.
| amkharg26 wrote:
| PFAS contamination is one of those problems that seems
| insurmountable given how persistent these chemicals are. The fact
| that electrolysis can break down the carbon-fluorine bonds is
| genuinely exciting.
|
| What's particularly interesting is the potential for on-site
| remediation. Traditional methods often involve excavating
| contaminated soil or pumping and treating groundwater
| indefinitely. If this can be scaled cost-effectively, it could
| transform cleanup efforts at industrial sites and military bases.
|
| The key question is economic viability at scale. Energy costs for
| electrolysis can be significant, and PFAS contamination is often
| widespread. Would be curious to see lifecycle analysis comparing
| this to current remediation methods.
| istjohn wrote:
| This does not treat PFAS.
| kawfey wrote:
| Before reading the article, I guessed the headline was alluding
| to the popularity of Hypochlorus Acid as a sanitizer, made from
| electrolysis of slightly acidic salty (NaCl) water. I had a kid
| and the algorithm led me to discovering a brand of in-home
| electrolysis generators, and after a fair bit of research on
| safety and efficacy I've been using it quite a bit.
|
| Technically it solves contamination problems too.
| krbaccord94f wrote:
| Key point is this shift, which takes place from ideology to
| institutions. Ele-ctrolysis is the procedure of isolating ions
| from substrate. Running electrical current in water, which tends
| to separate the molecules as the inverse, being the addition of
| O2 to H20 in creating the peroxide or H2O2 distillation.
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