alt.hn

12/30/2025 at 6:08:32 PM

Electrolysis can solve one of our biggest contamination problems

 https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2025/11/electrolysis-can-solve-one-of-our-biggest-contamination-problems.html

by PaulHoule

12/30/2025 at 7:15:22 PM

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...

by CGMthrowaway

12/31/2025 at 8:16:01 AM

To clarify, it's not "Africa and Asia". Only India, South Africa, and Zimbabwe are still using DDT actively.

by frontfor

12/31/2025 at 9:59:58 AM

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

by throwaway290

12/31/2025 at 8:12:49 AM

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

by user_7832

12/31/2025 at 2:23:17 PM

The DDT scare was a hoax

by marsven_422

1/1/2026 at 8:20:02 PM

Funny, the bald eagle populations beg to differ and there is a whole other group of people who say polio was a hoax driven by DDT (both sides are probably crazy)

by CGMthrowaway

12/30/2025 at 11:58:18 PM

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.

by buildsjets

12/31/2025 at 2:48:10 AM

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.

by scythe

12/31/2025 at 12:33:11 AM

They're not leaving it in the soil. The benzene is extracted as a useful byproduct.

by jjk166

12/31/2025 at 12:58:20 AM

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.

by buildsjets

12/31/2025 at 2:41:35 AM

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.

by zdragnar

12/31/2025 at 11:57:23 AM

> 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

by jjk166

12/31/2025 at 1:27:51 AM

> 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?

by irjustin

12/31/2025 at 1:38:17 AM

Courtesy of another poster down-thread.

https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/chab/organ...

by buildsjets

12/31/2025 at 1:48:22 AM

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

by irjustin

12/31/2025 at 2:39:14 AM

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.

by zdragnar

12/31/2025 at 5:19:34 AM

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?

by sargun

12/31/2025 at 3:53:37 PM

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.

by zdragnar

12/30/2025 at 7:11:27 PM

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?

by CheeseFromLidl

12/30/2025 at 7:26:37 PM

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.

by coryrc

12/31/2025 at 7:04:56 AM

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

by worthless-trash

12/30/2025 at 11:30:42 PM

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?

by LorenPechtel

12/31/2025 at 2:49:33 AM

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.

by zdragnar

12/31/2025 at 7:49:52 AM

> 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

by gucci-on-fleek

12/31/2025 at 2:51:48 PM

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.

by zdragnar

1/1/2026 at 5:28:41 AM

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

by LorenPechtel

12/31/2025 at 11:15:21 AM

>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.

by potato3732842

12/30/2025 at 8:19:41 PM

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?

by talkingtab

12/31/2025 at 12:38:50 AM

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.

by jjk166

12/31/2025 at 1:17:21 PM

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.

by pkphilip

12/31/2025 at 2:27:41 PM

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.

by lrasinen

12/30/2025 at 7:15:55 PM

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

by awakeasleep

12/30/2025 at 7:22:45 PM 

  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*

by CheeseFromLidl

12/30/2025 at 7:10:02 PM

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...

by chrisweekly

12/31/2025 at 12:01:05 AM

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.

by buildsjets

12/31/2025 at 2:45:20 AM

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.

by zdragnar

12/31/2025 at 3:44:25 AM

> 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.

by MangoToupe

12/31/2025 at 3:57:15 PM

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.

by zdragnar

1/1/2026 at 12:38:00 AM

> Considering the existing DDT contamination, ending up with dirt that needs to be fortified with compost is hardly the worst trade-off.

I would definitely bet against this if I could. Soil is far more potent than DDT can harm.

by MangoToupe

1/1/2026 at 4:51:27 AM

I don't think anyone is really too concerned about DDT harming the soil itself.

DDT, like organic mercury compounds, bioaccumulates up the food chain. Contaminated soil is sequestered to prevent it from contaminating insects and animals and then humans.

Hence, the trade-off: DDT in the ecosystem, or killing soil and rebuilding it with compost and time.

by zdragnar

1/1/2026 at 7:20:31 AM

You shouldn't call it "soil" after treating it like this. Maybe "processed earth" or something like that

by MangoToupe

12/31/2025 at 9:39:44 AM

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.

by modo_mario

12/31/2025 at 4:03:20 PM

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.

by zdragnar

12/31/2025 at 1:18:54 PM

Render me surprised as there is no Na in DDT.

by guenthert

12/30/2025 at 7:13:47 PM

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...

by philipkglass

12/30/2025 at 7:34:07 PM

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.

by hosh

12/30/2025 at 8:01:16 PM

>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?

by CGMthrowaway

12/30/2025 at 8:36:51 PM

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.

by hosh

12/30/2025 at 8:50:27 PM

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.”

by odyssey7

12/31/2025 at 12:41:31 AM

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.

by ggm

12/31/2025 at 1:35:56 AM

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.

by buildsjets

12/31/2025 at 2:47:05 AM

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.

by tingletech

12/31/2025 at 7:53:10 AM

> 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

by gucci-on-fleek

12/31/2025 at 11:22:19 AM

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.

by ggm

12/31/2025 at 4:11:34 AM

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.

by kawfey

12/30/2025 at 8:04:50 PM

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.

by metalman

12/31/2025 at 4:04:52 AM

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.

by amkharg26

12/31/2025 at 4:10:13 AM

This does not treat PFAS.

by istjohn

12/31/2025 at 9:02:15 AM

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.

by krbaccord94f