World Environment Day 2025: Waste is a Design Flaw.

 

It’s World Environment Day today, often a day where we consider spaces that we do not inhabit; national parks, deep ocean, dense forest, and the importance of their protection. These causes are absolutely paramount, but what drives Bioforcetech is the fact that ‘the environment’ is so much closer to you than these distant wildernesses we visit.  

 

Wherever you are sitting today reading this, and all the places between there and the wilderness we often picture, is ‘the environment.’ We are all within ‘the environment,’ and the waste we create affects it at every level; air, land, and water.

 

Biosolids are one of the most obvious and truly human forms of waste that we create, and so long as we are here, biosolids will be too. Current dominant management practices have resulted in methane emissions (landfill), and/or soil and water contamination (land application) that are directly contributing to environmental harm. 

 

PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), a group of synthetic chemicals commonly found in household products, firefighting foam, and industrial waste, and they do not break down in the environment. Unfortunately, PFAS content in biosolids has been proven and published with extreme confidence, resulting in contaminated soils in states across the country. 

 

The contamination of soil due to the spreading of biosolids with PFAS has led to regulation outright banning the practice within the past five years. According to Safer States a total of 18 states have introduced 27 PFAS regulations relating directly to biosolids, and 4 states have passed 6 of those 27 regulations. Maine banned land application in 2022, and Vermont and New York both adopted moratoriums on the practice this year, with states like Mississippi, Oklahoma, and more following suit by introducing restrictions or bans for a vote to adopt.

 

Landfills continue to be one of the largest sources of methane emissions and groundwater contamination with organics in landfill amounting to roughly 15% of US methane emissions in 2022 (US EPA). When biosolids containing PFAS or other toxic compounds are disposed of in landfill, the resulting emissions contribute and any value in the material is lost. 

 

If you are interested in the latest reporting coverage on Biosolids and PFAS, Hiroko Tabuchi of the NY Times covers pollution and has written about PFAS in biosolids over 10 times since December and Waste Dive often reports on PFAS in biosolids.

 

Rather than sending biosolids to landfills, or land applying sludge, we use our BioDryers and Sigma Pyrolysis system to convert biosolids into OurCarbon®, a clean, stable carbon negative material that can be reintegrated into industry, often in the place of fossil equivalents. OurCarbon is used in concrete, inks and coatings, polymers, and more, reducing emissions, storing carbon, and giving designers and builders a carbon-negative alternative to industry standard materials.

 

 

 

 The Bioforcetech system has been published by the US EPA to remove PFAS in the resulting material to zero or non-detect levels, yielding a new material that is completely free of these ‘forever chemicals.’ What was once a contamination site can now be seen as a collection point for a removal opportunity.

 

 

At Bioforcetech, we believe waste is a design flaw, not a given. And we have set out to transform biosolid waste from wastewater plants into a sustainable multiple-use product, lifting burdens off of citizens, municipalities, and industry in the process.

 

This World Environment Day, we’re proud to be part of a growing movement that’s not just reacting to environmental problems but solving them at the root cause. With installations operating across the US and in Italy, we’re showing what’s possible with true waste transformation.