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This is the shocking true-life story of how PFAS - a set of toxic chemicals most people have never heard of - poisoned the entire country. Based on original, shoe-leather reporting in four highly contaminated towns and damning documents from the polluters' own files, 'Poisoning the Well' traces an ugly history of corporate greed and devastation of human lives. We learn that PFAS, the 'forever chemicals' found in everyday products, from cooking pans to mascara, are coursing through the veins of 97% of Americans.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are pollutants that have demonstrated a high level of environmental persistence and are very difficult to remediate. As the body of literature on their environmental effects has increased, so has regulatory and research scrutiny. The widespread usage of PFAS in industrial applications and consumer products, complicated by their environmental release, mobility, fate, and transport, have resulted in multiple exposure routes for humans. Furthermore, low screening levels and stringent regulatory standards that vary by state introduce considerable uncertainty and potential costs in the environmental management of PFAS. The recalcitrant nature of PFAS render their removal difficult, but existing and emerging technologies can be leveraged to destroy or sequester PFAS in a variety of environmental matrices. Additionally, new research on PFAS remediation technologies has emerged to address the efficiency, costs, and other shortcomings of existing remediation methods. Further research on the impact of field parameters such as secondary water quality effects, the presence of co-contaminants and emerging PFAS, reaction mechanisms, defluorination yields, and the decomposition products of treatment technologies is needed to fully evaluate these emerging technologies, and industry attention should focus on treatment train approaches to improve efficiency and reduce the cost of treatment.

The growing environmental challenge of electrical energy systems has prompted a substantial increase in renewable energy generation. Such generation systems allow for significant reduction of CO2 emissions compared with a traditional fossil fuel plant. Furthermore, several improvements in power systems network configuration and operation combined with new technologies have enabled reduction of losses and energy demand, thus contributing to reduction of CO2 emissions. Another environmental threat identified in electrical networks is the leaking of insulating sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) gas used in electrical gas insulated substations (GIS) and equipment. Because of its Global Warming Potential (GWP) of nearly 24,000 and its long life in the atmosphere (over 3000 years), SF6 gas was recognized as a greenhouse gas at the 1997 COP3; since then its use and emissions in the atmosphere have been regulated by international treaties. It is expected that as soon as an alternative insulating gas is found, SF6 use in high-voltage (HV) equipment will be banned. This paper presents an overview of the key research advances made in recent years in the quest to find eco-friendly gases to replace SF6. The review reports the main properties of candidate gases that are being investigated; in particular, natural gases (dry air, N2 or CO2) and polyfluorinated gases especially Trifluoroiodomethane (CF3I), Perfluorinated Ketones, Octafluorotetra-hydrofuran, Hydrofluoroolefin (HFOs), and Fluoronitriles are presented and their strengths and weaknesses are discussed with an emphasis on their dielectric properties (especially their dielectric strength), GWP, and boiling point with respect to the minimum operating temperature for HV power network applications.

Due to their unique properties, perfluorinated substances (PFAS) are widely used in multiple industrial and commercial applications, but they are toxic for animals, humans included. This review presents some available data on the PFAS environmental distribution in the world, and in particular in Europe and in the Veneto region of Italy, where it has become a serious problem for human health. The consumption of contaminated food and drinking water is considered one of the major source of exposure for humans. Worldwide epidemiological studies report the negative effects that PFAS have on human health, due to environmental pollution, including infertility, steroid hormone perturbation, thyroid, liver and kidney disorders, and metabolic disfunctions. In vitro and in vivo researches correlated PFAS exposure to oxidative stress effects (in mammals as well as in other vertebrates of human interest), produced by a PFAS-induced increase of reactive oxygen species formation. The cellular antioxidant defense system is activated by PFAS, but it is only partially able to avoid the oxidative damage to biomolecules.

This review is a survey of recent advances in studies concerning the impact of poly- and perfluorinated organic compounds in aquatic organisms. After a brief introduction on poly- and perfluorinated compounds (PFCs) features, an overview of recent monitoring studies is reported illustrating ranges of recorded concentrations in water, sediments, and species. Besides presenting general concepts defining bioaccumulative potential and its indicators, the biodistribution of PFCs is described taking in consideration different tissues/organs of the investigated species as well as differences between studies in the wild or under controlled laboratory conditions. The potential use of species as bioindicators for biomonitoring studies are discussed and data are summarized in a table reporting the number of monitored PFCs and their total concentration as a function of investigated species. Moreover, biomolecular effects on taxonomically different species are illustrated. In the final paragraph, main findings have been summarized and possible solutions to environmental threats posed by PFCs in the aquatic environment are discussed.

In this perspective, we evaluate key and emerging epidemiological and toxicological data concerning immunotoxicity of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and seek to reconcile conflicting conclusions from two reviews published in 2016. We summarize ways that immunosuppression and immunoenhancement are defined and explain how specific outcomes are used to evaluate immunotoxicity in humans and experimental animals. We observe that different approaches to defining immunotoxicological outcomes, particularly those that do not produce clinical disease, may lead to different conclusions from epidemiological and toxicological studies. The fundamental point that we make is that aspects of epidemiological studies considered as limitations can be minimized when data from toxicological studies support epidemiological findings. Taken together, we find that results of epidemiological studies, supported by findings from toxicological studies, provide strong evidence that humans exposed to PFOA and PFOS are at risk for immunosuppression.

A novel Molecularly Imprinted Polymer (MIP) able to bind perfluorinated compounds, combined with a surface plasmon resonance (SPR) optical fiber platform, is presented. The new MIP receptor has been deposited on a D-shaped plastic optical fiber (POF) covered with a photoresist buffer layer and a thin gold film. The experimental results have shown that the developed SPR-POF-MIP sensor makes it possible to selectively detect the above compounds. In this work, we present the results obtained with perfluorooctanoate (PFOA) compound, and they hold true when obtained with a perfluorinated alkylated substances (PFAs) mixture sample. The sensor’s response is the same for PFOA, perfluorooctanesulfonate (PFOS) or PFA contaminants in the C4–C11 range. We have also tested a sensor based on a non-imprinted polymer (NIP) on the same SPR in a D-shaped POF platform. The limit of detection (LOD) of the developed chemical sensor was 0.13 ppb. It is similar to the one obtained by the configuration based on a specific antibody for PFOA/PFOS exploiting the same SPR-POF platform, already reported in literature. The advantage of an MIP receptor is that it presents a better stability out of the native environment, very good reproducibility, low cost and, furthermore, it can be directly deposited on the gold layer, without modifying the metal surface by functionalizing procedures.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a class of man-made chemicals of global concern for many health and regulatory agencies due to their widespread use and persistence in the environment (in soil, air, and water), bioaccumulation, and toxicity. This concern has catalyzed a need to aggregate data to support research efforts that can, in turn, inform regulatory and statutory actions. An ongoing challenge regarding PFAS has been the shifting definition of what qualifies a substance to be a member of the PFAS class. There is no single definition for a PFAS, but various attempts have been made to utilize substructural definitions that either encompass broad working scopes or satisfy narrower regulatory guidelines. Depending on the size and specificity of PFAS substructural filters applied to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) DSSTox database, currently exceeding 900,000 unique substances, PFAS substructure-defined space can span hundreds to tens of thousands of compounds. This manuscript reports on the curation of PFAS chemicals and assembly of lists that have been made publicly available to the community via the EPA’s CompTox Chemicals Dashboard. Creation of these PFAS lists required the harvesting of data from EPA and online databases, peer-reviewed publications, and regulatory documents. These data have been extracted and manually curated, annotated with structures, and made available to the community in the form of lists defined by structure filters, as well as lists comprising non-structurable PFAS, such as polymers and complex mixtures. These lists, along with their associated linkages to predicted and measured data, are fueling PFAS research efforts within the EPA and are serving as a valuable resource to the international scientific community.

Electrically switchable adhesion enables the dynamic and on‐demand modulation of adhesion through electrical control. Herein, a new class of electrochemical adhesives based on the perfluoro‐sulfonic acid (PFSA) ionomers is presented, which deliver robust adhesion with precise tunability through modulation of the applied charge density. Remarkably, once activated, these adhesives maintain strong adhesion without continuous power input, enabling long‐term programmable bonding. Electrochemically tunable adhesion between PFSA ionomers and copper substrates is investigated. A positive potential to the copper substrate promotes sulfonate‐copper coordination at the interface, resulting in strong adhesion, whereas a negative bias triggers detachment. Fracture mechanics analysis reveals a linear relationship between the critical energy release rate (Gc) and applied charge density (q) with a value of 3.2  ×  10−2 J C−1, confirming that electrochemical reactions govern adhesion and can be precisely modulated by the applied charge density. Based on PFSA ionomers, it demonstrates high‐performance electrochemically activated lap‐shear clutches capable of sustaining a force capacity (Fc) of 200 N cm−2 with an on/off ratio of 462, maintaining more than 2 months of adhesion retention without a power supply and enduring more than 50 on/off adhesion cycles for repeated use—outperforming existing electrochemical adhesives. Electrochemical adhesion provides stable, long‐term adhesion without continuous power input after electro‐programming, enabling applications that require durable and controllable adhesion, such as biomedical patches, structural health monitoring sensors, and aerospace devices. Herein, we demonstrate high‐performance electrochemical adhesives based on a perfluoro‐sulfonic acid (PFSA) ionomer coordinated with a copper substrate, enabling precise adhesion control, high on/off adhesion switchability, repeatability, and long‐term adhesion without a continuous voltage supply.

Perfluorinated compounds (PFCs) are manmade chemicals, containing the covalent C-F bond, which is among the strongest chemical bonds known to organic chemistry. Abundant use of these chemicals contaminates air, water, and soil around the world. Despite recent initiatives and legal regulations set to reduce their omnipresence, conventional water purification processes are either inefficient or very expensive, especially for low PFC contamination levels. This research is focused on the non-thermal atmospheric plasma (NTAP) decomposition of very low concentrations (<1 µg/L) of PFCs (especially perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonate (PFOS)), present in the wastewater produced during the process of PFCs removal from contaminated soil. The efficiency of the decomposition process was investigated for air, oxygen, and nitrogen plasma, with exposure times of 1–10 min and different plasma nozzle- and reactor sizes. Experiments demonstrated that the NTAP treatment is an efficient alternative method for degradation of more than 50% of the initial PFC concentration in the water samples, in less than 200 s. The final concentration of PFC showed strong dependency on the tested parameters. The treatment effect showed to be strongly non-linear with time, followed by the reduction of the pH-value of the treated sample, which might present a limiting factor for further PFC decomposition.