Can It Be Cleaned Up?

By Robert O'Neal. A 6-part series on what's being tried to get PFAS out of water and soil, what works, what doesn't yet, and who is paying for it.

Part 1 of 6: Can it be cleaned up?

The question we get most: once PFAS is in the ground and the water, can anybody get it out?

The honest answer is yes for water, and not yet for most farmland.

There are two different jobs here, and people mix them up.

Removing PFAS means pulling it out of the water or soil and putting it somewhere else. A filter does that. So does digging up dirt and hauling it off.

Destroying PFAS means breaking that carbon-fluorine bond so it is gone for good. That is much harder, and it is newer.

Most of what's being done today is removing. The PFAS ends up in a used filter, a landfill or a pile of dirt. It is still out there.

The next parts go through water first, then soil, then who pays.

Part 2 of 6: Cleaning the water

Water is where the cleanup is furthest along.

Town water plants and home systems use three main tools: activated carbon, special resins, and reverse osmosis. They work. But they remove PFAS, they don't destroy it. The used carbon, resin and reject water are loaded with PFAS and have to go somewhere.

As we covered in Long and Short-Chain, carbon does a poor job on the newer short-chain PFAS. Reverse osmosis and certain resins do better.

The new work is on destroying it. As of 2026, several methods were expected to be ready for wider use in 2026 and 2027. They use extreme heat and pressure in water, strong alkaline treatment, plasma, or electricity to break PFAS apart.

In one industrial test, a UV-based system treated more than 170,000 gallons of process water and destroyed 99.99 percent of the PFAS.

One of these, called supercritical water oxidation, is also being tested on sewage sludge itself. That matters to us. Destroying PFAS in sludge before it ever gets spread is cheaper than cleaning up a field after.

Most of this is still at factories and test sites, not small towns or farm wells.

Part 3 of 6: Cleaning the soil, the old way

For farmland, the proven options are rough.

You can dig the dirt up and haul it to a landfill. Or you can run it through machines that heat it hot enough to burn off the PFAS.

Researchers put the cost at $800,000 to $1.6 million per hectare. That's roughly $325,000 to $650,000 an acre. For all the farmland in this country that may be affected, they figured the bill at about $8 trillion.

It also leaves the land worse off. Digging and burning strip the topsoil and release a lot of carbon dioxide. The field isn't fit to farm afterward.

So for a working farm, that's not a real option.

The other approach is to lock PFAS in place. You mix activated carbon or a similar material into the soil so the PFAS sticks to it instead of moving into water and plants.

In one study, grass grown in sludge-treated soil with carbon mixed in took up only about 3 percent of the PFAS that grass took up without it. A farm field in Germany that got paper-mill sludge is being treated this way, and early results show less PFAS leaching down toward the groundwater.

The catch: the PFAS is still in the ground. And carbon holds the long-chain ones much better than the short-chain ones.

Part 4 of 6: Using plants to pull it out

The idea that gives farmers the most hope is using plants.

Plants pull PFAS up with water. That's the problem we've talked about with crops. Researchers are trying to turn it around: grow a crop on purpose to soak PFAS out of the soil, then harvest it and get rid of it.

Hemp is the plant getting the most attention. In northern Maine, members of the Mi'kmaq Nation have grown hemp on contaminated land since 2022. Of 28 PFAS found in the soil, 10 showed up in the hemp.

Grass works too. One study found grass took up more PFAS after it was cut and grew back. Mowing and regrowth could keep pulling it out over time.

The problems: plants alone don't get it all, because some PFAS stays stuck to the soil. And you're left with a pile of contaminated plants that has to be destroyed, not fed or composted.

In July 2026 a Yale-led team put out a plan to speed this up. Add crushed rock to raise the soil pH, which helps plants pull up more PFAS. Then burn the harvested plants into biochar, which destroys the PFAS, and put the biochar back on the field to hold what's left.

They figure it at about $1,460 per hectare, around $590 an acre, compared to hundreds of thousands for digging. It's still a computer model built on lab data, not something proven in a field yet. But it's aimed at keeping farmers on their land.

Part 5 of 6: What about hemp grown for CBD?

If hemp pulls PFAS out of the soil, a fair question follows. What about hemp grown for CBD on sludge-treated land? Can that PFAS end up in people?

It can.

A Penn State greenhouse study compared five kinds of hemp. In most of them, PFAS built up mainly in the leaves, with very little in the grain. But in the CBD variety, most of it collected in the flower. That's the part harvested for CBD.

Researchers at Northern Michigan University found a short-chain PFAS moved up into hemp leaves, stems and flowers. The long-chain ones like PFOS and PFOA mostly stayed in the roots. That's the same pattern we covered in Long and Short-Chain, Part 6.

How much gets in varies a lot. The Penn State team said the varieties they tested were not strong collectors of PFAS. In Belgium, hemp grown with soil additives meant to boost uptake had PFAS in its leaves up to 27 times higher than the soil around it.

Here's what nobody knows yet: how much PFAS in the flower makes it into CBD oil, gummies or smokable flower. We couldn't find a study that follows it that far.

The people growing hemp to clean up PFAS land don't sell it. The team in Maine has a company haul off and dispose of their plants.

Bottom line: hemp grown to clean the soil is waste, not product. And anyone thinking about growing CBD hemp on ground that got sludge should test the flower before it goes to anybody. Some labs now test hemp and cannabis for PFAS.

Part 6 of 6: Who pays, and what the rules say

Cleanup costs money. So who pays is the real question.

Drinking water. In 2024 EPA set national limits on six PFAS in public water. In May 2026 EPA proposed keeping the limits for PFOA and PFOS, but letting water systems apply for more time, until 2031. It also proposed dropping the limits for PFHxS, PFNA, GenX, and the mixture that includes PFBS.

That means GenX and PFBS, the replacement chemicals we covered in Long and Short-Chain, would lose their federal limits.

EPA also announced nearly $1 billion in grants for small and disadvantaged communities to deal with PFAS and other contaminants in drinking water. That's money for town systems, not private wells.

Farmland. There's no national program for farms. Maine is the one state that has built one. It set up a fund with $60 million in state money, and plans to spend about $70 million with federal money added, to help farmers whose health, business and land were hurt by PFAS.

South Carolina has nothing like that. Farm families here who got sludge spread on their land are on their own for testing, lost income and cleanup.

That's what we're asking for. Test the land. Help the farmers. And make the companies that made and discharged these chemicals pay for the cleanup, not the people who farm the ground.