House natural resources committee hears presentation on commercial PFAS destruction technology

The Michigan House Committee on Natural Resources and Tourism heard testimony from Revive Environmental on a commercial process the company says can permanently destroy per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in contaminated liquids.

David Truba, chief executive officer of Revive Environmental, told the committee by Zoom that the company’s supercritical-water reactors operate at “600 degrees C and over 3,200 PSI” and that the result is “water, salt” and an innocuous fluorinated salt rather than persistent PFAS compounds. Truba said the company’s current operations include a facility near Grand Rapids and contracts with three states for treatment of concentrated firefighting-foam (AFFF) wastes and other PFAS-impacted liquids.

Committee members were shown maps and examples of Michigan sites with PFAS detections, and Truba noted that Michigan’s broad testing programs and state permitting have encouraged companies to validate and deploy destructive technologies. He said Michigan was among the first states to permit a destruction technology and that the company pursues both air and discharge permits to operate locally while providing batch-level certificates documenting treated effluent.

Truba described Revive’s business model as “water as a service,” in which customers pay per gallon for concentration and destruction. He said the company’s Grand Rapids operation employed about 10 operators, that reactors can process “hundreds of gallons a day,” and that year-to-date throughput included roughly 6,000 gallons of AFFF and about 300,000 gallons of impacted water, with an expectation to exceed 12,000 gallons of AFFF by year end. He said the firm reports a roughly 96% first-pass success rate in meeting drinking-water analytical limits for targeted PFAS species and uses polishing steps when needed.

Lawmakers pressed Truba on limits and scope. He said the company currently treats liquids and partners with other vendors for soil washing and extraction that convert contaminated solids into a liquid stream the reactors can handle. He acknowledged Revive did not yet have a commercially deployed offering for biosolids but said technologies to remove PFAS from solids were in development.

On permitting, Truba said permits address two community impacts: air emissions and liquid discharge to a public sewer or publicly owned treatment works (POTW). He said Revive’s Grand Rapids permit sets PFOS/PFOA discharge limits at 4 parts per trillion and that the company tests 100% of outgoing batches for required parameters before discharge. He added that Michigan’s Great Lakes-area limits and EGLE’s (Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy) engagement have helped establish local regulatory pathways.

Committee members also asked about costs. Truba provided a site example — a pulp-and-paper landfill with about 110 million gallons of leachate per year — and said the treatment chain his company proposed would cost roughly $700,000 per year for that facility (under one set of concentration-and-destruction assumptions), which he noted equates to “less than a penny per gallon” on an annual basis for treated water. He contrasted that with liability examples for small airports that released hundreds of gallons of AFFF and are facing multi‑million-dollar lawsuits, saying destruction at source would have been far cheaper in those cases.

Representatives also discussed analytical scope. Truba said current targeted testing covers 48 PFAS species and that the company conducts total organic fluorine tests pre‑ and post‑treatment to demonstrate broader destruction. He told the committee the reactors approach broad defluorination across chain lengths and functional groups and that, in his view, the chemistry yields “high confidence” of destruction across measured and unmeasured PFAS.

Several members sought practical clarifications — whether the reactors can be deployed onsite in shipping‑container modules (Truba said the reactors fit in a 20‑foot shipping container while concentration steps can be housed in 40‑foot containers), how the company handles metals and pH for POTW discharge (he said those are permitted and measured batch by batch), and how groundwater, soil‑washing and biosolids fit into the remediation chain (Truba said integrated approaches are required and that Revive focuses on the destruction step for liquids).

The committee did not take formal action on the presentation. Truba said the company was pursuing additional validation, federal demonstrations and expansion of local facilities in Michigan.

The presentation highlighted a growing commercial pathway for PFAS destruction but left open technical and policy questions members raised about handling solids, biosolids and large groundwater plumes, as well as how permitting and POTW capacity will be coordinated if states scale up destructive services.