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.
>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.
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?
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?
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.
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*
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:
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"
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.
More narrowly, Paul Stamets has worked a lot on mycroremediation — remediating with fungi.
So... he invented the ocean?
…who is this? This guy [1]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Todd_(Canadian_biologist)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254251962...
Certainly what comes out of the machine will not be living.
"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...