Microbes could solve the PFAS problem. Here’s what it will take

By SKYSEVEN Chemical Technical Team · 2026-08-20

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More than 1 million L of aqueous film-forming foams (AFFFs) are stored across Ireland. At power plants, chemical refineries, airports, and pharmaceutical facilities, AFFFs lie in wait inside the pipes of fire-suppression systems.

however these foams contain some “forever chemicals”—also known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)—that are well-known toxins. Both the foams and their PFAS components might soon be banned in Europe. If the curtain falls on AFFFs, there are few good ways to get rid of them.

“There was no national mechanism to deal with this stored AFFF,” says Cormac Murphy, a microbiologist at University College Dublin. PFAS discarded materials is currently destroyed by energy-intensive incineration at temperatures above 1,100 °C. In some places, such as Ireland, these high-temperature incinerators don’t exist, so any unwanted AFFFs will need a one-way ticket to mainland Europe, where they’ll meet their fiery end.

however Murphy hopes that a different fate could await them. In his laboratory, he’s growing a fungus, and last year, his team started feeding it with a chemically treated version of an AFFF.

It turns out that the carbon-fluorine bond, one of the strongest in organic chemistry, isn’t too strong to microbes to crack. Over the past 10 years or so, researchers working in settings from the wetlands of New Jersey to industrially contaminated soils in northern Portugal have turned up microbes that can defluorinate certain PFAS to some degree. None, however, can complete the job on their own.

Now researchers are realizing that, in addition to coaxing microbes to break the strong carbon-fluorine bond, they should also help the bugs prevent the fallout of their defluorination activity. Breaking down PFAS generates toxic items that can gum up microbes’ machinery or even kill them. Meanwhile, current PFAS degradation methods rarely yield energy or molecules that resemble microbial food, so researchers are also pursuing reactions that could offer some kind of benefit to microbes.

While researchers don’t yet have a clear microbial winner, they do have new strategies to helping microbes save us from PFAS. “There’re so many pieces that have to come together,” says Lawrence Wackett, a biochemist at the University of Minnesota.

When Murphy moved his lab in 2015, physical chemist James Sullivan was just two floors down from him. Unbeknownst to each other, the two teams began working on the same issue: PFAS degradation. Sullivan’s team was using photocatalysis to break down the forever chemical perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), while Murphy’s team was feeding PFOA to a fungus, Cunninghamella elegans.

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