Bio-Based Polymer Offers Sustainable Option for “Forever Chemicals” Cleanup
The nanofiber membrane material can stop PFOA in its tracks, before being refreshed sustainably.
Researchers have developed a new bio-based polymer membrane that effectively traps over 94% of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA)—a notable “forever chemical”—and removes it from water.
The membrane, composed of a network of billions of nanofibers, can then be heat-treated to remove the trapped pollutants before being reprocessed and reused to clean more water. This makes it a more sustainable option for water treatment, the researchers say, as other conventional methods often either require full replacement or generate significant amounts of secondary waste.
The dangers of PFAS in water
“Forever chemicals”, also known as polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), are a large and diverse chemical class characterized by their extremely strong carbon–fluorine bonds. This enables them to resist normal degradation in the environment, making them extremely persistent pollutants.
“This persistence is a major concern because PFAS can spread widely through water systems and are difficult to address once contamination has occurred,” study author Xiang Ding, PhD, research associate and core technology translator at the University of Bath, told Technology Networks.
“PFAS removal is important because water is one of the main pathways through which these chemicals can move through the environment and potentially enter the food chain and human exposure routes,” Ding continued. “That is why there is growing interest in treatment technologies that can capture PFAS effectively and support safer water systems.”
The extremely chemical stability of PFAS means that they are highly resistant to conventional water remediation techniques, which often rely on chemical oxidation or biological treatments. Other PFAS-focused cleanup methods, such as those that use electricity, sunlight, or microbes to break down the compounds, can be expensive or difficult to scale up to industrial levels. As a result, scientists are developing water filtration technologies using advanced materials that can physically capture troublesome PFAS.
“Many existing water treatment materials have already shown very promising PFAS adsorption performance, so the need for new technology is not simply about replacing current materials. Rather, it is about expanding the range of options available and addressing other important considerations beyond adsorption capacity alone,” Ding explained.
“For example, in addition to removal efficiency, researchers are increasingly interested in questions such as how sustainable [the material] that removes the actual pollutant is, whether it can be regenerated or recycled, how complex its preparation is, and whether it can be manufactured in a practical and scalable way. These factors are important if we want PFAS treatment materials to be used more widely in real applications.”
Water-responsive membrane works like a tightening net
The new material developed by Ding and colleagues is a polymer, poly(hexamethylene 2,5-furandicarboxylamide) (PA6F). PA6F has already been investigated by polymer chemists—it is known to have a high thermal stability and to have strong intermolecular interactions due to its furan ring and amide groups—but its behavior in water and its potential use for pollutant remediation remained unexplored.
To turn PA6F into a PFAS-capturing membrane, the researchers used electrospinning to spin the polymer into a network of ultrathin nanofibers.
“What makes this material interesting is that the nanofibre membrane is water-responsive. When it comes into contact with water, the individual nanofibres swell, and at the same time, the overall fibrous network becomes denser. So instead of behaving as a static membrane, it reorganizes into a tighter structure,” Ding noted.
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“This change is important for PFAS capture. First, the denser network makes it harder for the PFOA molecules to move back out once they enter the membrane. In other words, the structure creates a confinement effect. Second, the polymer itself contains amide groups, which can interact strongly with PFOA through hydrogen-bonding-related interactions and other favorable molecular interactions. So the material is doing two things at once: it is physically creating a tighter trapping environment, and chemically providing sites that have affinity for the pollutant,” he said.
“I think the key point is that the capture is not driven by just one factor,” Ding added. “It comes from the combination of nanoscale fibre swelling, network densification, and polymer–pollutant interactions. That combination is what gives the membrane its strong PFOA uptake and retention behavior.
Reliable and renewable PFAS removal
Thanks to its water-activated swelling and hydrogen bonding interactions, the PA6F nanofiber membrane is able to achieve a PFOA removal efficiency of 94.6% at industrially relevant pollutant concentrations. It is also rapid, achieving ~50% removal within just 1 hour.
In addition to being effective, the membrane is also intentionally developed to be sustainable. The PA6F polymer can be synthesized from renewable furanic monomer units. Once the membrane is “full”, it can also be regenerated by undergoing heat treatment and being re-electrospun to form a new membrane using the same polymer material.
“The polymer we used is a bio-based semi-aromatic polyamide derived in part from renewable feedstocks. That is important because it shows that high-performance environmental materials do not always have to come from fully fossil-derived chemistries. In PFAS remediation, there is understandable concern that solving one environmental problem should not create another. So using a more sustainable polymer platform is a meaningful part of the story,” said Ding.
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He continued: “For me, the bio-based aspect is not just a label. It is about showing that sustainability can be built into the material design from the start. Our work suggests that renewable polymer chemistry can be combined with advanced processing, in this case, electrospinning, to create functional materials for difficult environmental applications.”
In terms of future research, Ding is eager to investigate the scalability of this approach to better understand how it could be applied to industrial water treatment.
“Electrospinning is already a versatile and increasingly scalable manufacturing method, so an obvious next step is to move from laboratory-scale membranes toward larger-format materials and more application-relevant device designs,” Ding said.
“A second priority is testing under more realistic water conditions. Real wastewater is much more complex than a simplified lab system, so it is important to understand how the membrane performs in the presence of competing ions, organic matter, and mixed contaminants, as well as with different PFAS structures and chain lengths.”
“Capturing PFAS is only part of the challenge; what happens afterward is equally important,” Ding added. “Future work should look more closely at how the pollutant can be safely removed from the material, how the polymer can be reused, and how performance changes over multiple cycles.”
Reference: Ding X, Kamran M, Zoumpouli GA, et al. Water-induced confinement of perfluorinated pollutants in biobased polyamide nanofibrous membranes. ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2026;18(12):18368-18379. doi: 10.1021/acsami.5c22145
About the interviewee:
Dr. Xiang Ding is a research associate and core technology translator at the University of Bath. His research focuses on sustainable functional materials, electrospun nanofibre membranes, and advanced polymer processing for environmental and healthcare applications. His recent work includes the development of a bio-based nanofibre membrane for PFAS capture from water, as well as sustainable polymer systems for wound dressing applications. Xiang received his PhD in materials engineering from Deakin University, Australia, and has published research in journals including Nano Energy, Journal of Materials Chemistry A, and ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
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