Electrolysis can solve one of our biggest contamination problems

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...

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.

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?

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...

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.