This looks very promising! Efficiently dehalogenizing toxins, preserving their carbon "skeletons" to be repurposed for valuable (nontoxic) industrial chemicals, creating NaCl (table salt) as a byproduct... seems full of win to me. Here's hoping...

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buildsjets 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Benzene is quite toxic. The EPA classifies benzene as a known human carcinogen for all routes of exposure. And their method leaves it buried it in the soil. It is not a valuable industrial chemical when it is in the soil, it is a pollutant.

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zdragnar 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Benzene is toxic, but it still has industrial uses. From the article:

> The reactor used by the researchers consists of an undivided electrolysis cell in which dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) is used as a solvent

They remove the DDT from the soil into the solvent (itself quite unpleasant). From there, it's pretty easy to filter out the soil and clean it up. Add water and boil or freeze dry to extract it back out, preferably capturing it to be reused.

	▲	modo_mario an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This all sounds like it would be many manyfold more expensive than just digging it all up, gathering it all togheter and putting it into some quarry or so that doesn't let much if any seepage happen.
	▲	MangoToupe 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> From there, it's pretty easy to filter out the soil and clean it up. "Cleaning" soil is an interesting concept. At what point does it just become dirt? Presumably some of the nutrients will remain, but it seems like this would sterilize it. Dirt still has use, of course, but soil is expensive to produce for a reason.