Can it work for PFAS-contaminated farms?
The pair was hardly dressed like typical farmers, but this was no typical farm. Sporting white hazmat suits and respirators, Chelli Stanley and Richard Silliboy lugged 5-gallon jugs of water toward bushy plots of hemp, each 30-by-30-foot patch a stark sign of order in the otherwise overgrown field. It was a warm September day in Limestone, a small town on the edge of the Maine-Canada border, and the pair struggled to breathe in the head-to-toe protective gear. Stanley, a founder of the environmental organization Upland Grassroots, recalls telling Silliboy, vice chief of the Aroostook Band of Micmac Nation, “This will be worth it someday.”
For Stanley and Silliboy, the focus was not so much the hemp they were growing as what it was doing. Their farm, once part of the Loring Air Force Base, is also a Superfund site — an area so polluted it’s marked high-priority for federal cleanup. Later, when the Aroostook Band of Micmacs took over the site’s ownership, they found its soil was rife with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, better known as PFAS, cancer-causing compounds that are so difficult to break down they’re commonly known as “forever chemicals.”
Because of their ability to bind to proteins, PFAS tend to bioaccumulate — building up in soil, water, and even human bodies. Under typical environmental conditions, they can persist for hundreds, even thousands of years. But there is hope at Loring: In 2020, researchers discovered that the Micmacs’ hemp plants were successfully sucking PFAS out of the contaminated soil. This practice, known as phytoremediation, could guide farmers across the country who have had to shut down after discovering their soil is tainted with the ubiquitous class of chemicals.
Sara Nason, one of the project’s lead researchers from the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, called their results “conservatively promising.” Other researchers see the potential too. David Huff, a senior scientist at the environmental consulting firm Nutter & Associates Inc., said, “At the end of the day, the data support phytoremediation as a viable approach and definitely established proof of concept.”
PFAS were once considered to be human-made miracle compounds. Due to their oil- and water-repelling properties, they were long used in all kinds of products from firefighting foam to stain-resistant carpets to nonstick pans. They’ve been linked to a host of health problems, including kidney and testicular cancer, liver damage, and suppressed immunity.