The call came like most of our interesting ones do: an airport in Wisconsin had tested positive for PFAS contamination. I jumped at the chance to get involved, since it was an airport in my community. The culprit was almost certainly decades of aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF), the firefighting chemical that kept runways safe while quietly poisoning the groundwater beneath them. The airport needed a solution, and I knew the obvious ones weren't going to cut it.
I'll be honest: there was a version of this story where others recommend the standard pump-and-treat approach, run it for 25 years, submit invoices the size of a small nation's GDP, and call it progress.
That approach has a long and well-funded tradition in environmental remediation. It also has a mixed track record. As an innovator who lives in this community, I felt compelled to choose a different path.
That choice reflects a much larger problem. A recent study puts the cost of remediating PFAS pollution across the EU at €440 billion by 2050. The U.S. Department of Defense alone estimates PFAS cleanup costs exceeding $9.3 billion in fiscal year 2025 and beyond. Those numbers are staggering — but also misleading. They imply contamination is primarily a funding problem, that bigger checks will resolve the crisis. In reality, money is the easy part. The hard part is knowing what to do with it.
PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — have earned their nickname. "Forever chemicals" resist nearly every conventional remediation technique we have. Pump-and-treat systems can run for years at immense cost and barely dent subsurface contamination. Excavation and landfilling simply relocates the problem. What the industry needs is not a larger budget for the same old playbook, but the courage to abandon the playbook entirely.
For this PFAS issue, we partnered with Fixed Earth Innovations, a Canadian company that has pioneered a biological treatment technology leveraging site-specific microbes. Rather than waiting centuries for native microbial populations to chip away at PFAS, we identify microbes already present in the soils and groundwater within the contaminated site; organisms that have developed an appetite for the local chemicals over time. These are cultivated through a non-GMO process and reintroduced directly into a treatment zone filled with our carbon-based BAM (Bioavailable Absorbent Media) technology, whose honeycomb structure absorbs and holds PFAS, but also provides an ideal habitat for microbial colonization. Think of it as the difference between hoping the right bacteria show up to the party and personally driving them there to socialize.
The project targeted a 1,600-square-foot contaminated area near the airfield. Within only a few months, monitoring showed PFAS concentration reductions of up to 90 percent within the source area and over 99% in the same well after one year. For a class of chemicals the industry assumed could not be biologically degraded at field scale, those results demand attention.
Skeptics will note that PFAS is a different beast. Its carbon-fluorine bonds are among the strongest in organic chemistry, which is precisely what makes these compounds so persistent. Conventional biological degradation pathways largely do not apply. The airport project is therefore not just a proof of concept. It is a deliberate stress test of whether novel biological approaches can hold up against the most chemically recalcitrant class of pollutants we face. If it can work here, with legacy AFFF contamination at an active airport, it opens a scalable path forward for thousands of similarly affected sites globally.
This Wisconsin site is one project, but it points toward something much larger. The real frontier is deliberate sequencing: biology does not need to do everything. At many PFAS sites, a biological phase can first reduce contaminant mass and mobility, reshaping subsurface chemistry and shrinking the treatment footprint. That creates a far more efficient environment for follow-on technologies to finish the job. High-temperature thermal destruction, for instance, becomes dramatically more tractable when applied to a source zone that biology has already worked over.
By combining biological expertise with thermal remediation capabilities, it’s possible to design an integrated treatment train where each technology operates in the conditions where it performs best. This garners far better results than forcing a single tool to solve the entire problem. This is not incremental improvement. It is a fundamentally different model for how remediation should be designed and executed.
The EU and U.S. cost estimates should alarm us. The alarm, however, should be directed not just at the scale of the problem, but at the complacency embedded in how we propose to solve it. Too many remediation programs are designed around what has been done before: familiar, defensible, and insufficiently effective. Project managers reach for proven technologies because the liability landscape penalizes failure and procurement rewards the familiar.
The remediation community has a role here that goes beyond the bench. We now understand phase behavior, reaction kinetics, and microbial metabolic pathways in ways most traditional approaches do not. That knowledge, applied creatively at field scale, is what unlocks complementary treatment sequences like the one we are developing.
We also need a regulatory and procurement culture willing to accept experimentation at scale. The local Wisconsin airport project exists because stakeholders were willing to try something different. That willingness is rarer than it should be. Greater openness to structured, monitored field trials with honest reporting of what does not work would accelerate exactly the progress the industry needs.
Forever chemicals have persisted in our environment because we have been patient with them. It is time to become impatient — not by spending more on the same approaches, but by insisting on smarter ones.
Larry Kinsman is Chief Technology Officer of VIYA Environmental, where he leads the development and deployment of advanced remediation strategies for complex contaminated sites.
