Ball milling breaks PFAS down into industrially useful fluoride source

There are now a several known methods available to breakdown so called PFAS plastics. I blogged here on 3/19/2025 about another method.

Forever chemicals is an ideological misnomer spread by demagogues!

"... In 2023, researchers ... developed a safer method by ball milling the calcium fluoride with a potassium phosphate salt, producing calcium phosphate and solid potassium salts that could be used to build carbon–fluorine bonds.2

The new work arose from a chance observation when the researchers explored the effect of different jar size for this process. ‘When the jar had a seal that was made from PTFE [polytetrafluoroethylene – commonly known as Teflon] instead of rubber, the fluoride recovery was more than what we introduced as fluorspar,’ ...  the researchers worked out that the phosphate acts as a nucleophilic oxyanion, causing cleavage of the carbon–fluorine bond in the PTFE. "

Ball milling breaks PFAS down into industrially useful fluoride source | Research | Chemistry World "Mechanochemistry could deal with ‘forever chemicals’"

Phosphate-enabled mechanochemical PFAS destruction for fluoride reuse (open access)

Fig. 1: Synthesis of fluorochemicals from PFASs.