alt Hacker NewsYeah, 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?
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>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.
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.