Center Leads International PFAS Roadmap That Seeks to Navigate a Global Path Toward Improved Management of Forever Chemicals

January 20, 2025 - Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), known as 'forever chemicals' for their recalcitrance, present an escalating danger to public health and aquatic environments. Despite significant advancements in risk assessment and filtration technologies, the rapid evolution of PFAS science has outpaced current solutions. The field now faces an overwhelming volume of unanswered remediation questions without a cohesive framework to address them.  To address this gap, New York State Center for Clean Water Technology Associate Director, Dr. Lokesh Padhye, has recently compiled and published The PFAS Roadmap in the international peer-reviewed journal, Sustainability Science and Technology. This has been a major effort over the past two years that began in New Zealand in March of 2024 and included a team of more than 35 of the world’s leading PFAS experts from North American, Europe, Asia, Australia including Harvard and Duke University. The contributor list reflects a truly global group of top researchers in the field that includes Center Research Scientist, Dr. Zhengyang “Philip” Wang, who led the section on adsorption.

Taken together, The PFAS Roadmap covers 15 topics that span the entire life cycle of PFAS - from their sources to their destruction. Important themes such as monitoring and analysis, understanding and predicting fate, source controls (regulation and replacement), and existing and emerging strategies for remediation (capture and destroy) are highlighted throughout the roadmap. Overall, the Roadmap reviews the many recent scientific and technological advancements that show promise for the management of PFAS. However, the Roadmap also makes it clear that there is no “silver bullet” for PFAS remediation and that multifaceted solutions will be needed to solve the PFAS problem. Long-term success will hinge on sustained collaboration among researchers, policymakers, industries, and communities, which this Roadmap is meant to catalyze.

Sustainability Science and Technology is an interdisciplinary, open access journal dedicated to advances in science, technology, and engineering that can contribute to a more sustainable planet. It focuses on breakthroughs in all science and engineering disciplines that address one or more of the three sustainability pillars: environmental, social and/or economic.