Environmental activists have claimed for decades that PFAS (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are "forever" chemicals that have been causing disease. Once former Natural Resources Defense Council environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. joined the Republican team, their belief in homeopathic effects and endocrine disruption was adopted by some on the right.

As much fun as it is to read Linda Birnbaum, Ph.D., former anti-science epidemiologist of the Obama administration, cozy up to Republicans now that one of her fellow believers runs HHS, it's no more scientific now than when it was during her tenure trying to scare the public using "correlation" inside the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Unless you are a rat and got an overdose, PFAS not only has never harmed you, it cannot. Even more bizarre is that of the nearly 12,000 PFAS chemicals, all but seven are natural. How does your body know to give itself cancer over a few but lets the rest slide on through without issue? You will never get a job inside Environmental Health Trust or Children's Defense Fund or any of the other supposed consumer advocacy groups if you ask awkward science questions like that.

But the hemp industry always has an answer for every question. Their answer is hemp. A new experiment made biochar from hemp and then soaked it in iron sulfate and then applied it to soil and waited a few months and then grew radishes in soil with heavy PFAS residues and found it lowered the PFAS in plants. By up to 26 percent.  They semi-speculate that is due to "additional positively charged and hydrophilic sites that support electrostatic attraction, ligand exchange, hydrogen bonding and complex formation with PFAS head groups while maintaining a hydrophobic carbon backbone that interacts with the fluorinated chains."



It sounds like an expensive process, more for people who claim they're buying acidic water than the scientifically literate, but wealthy progressives have money to burn so that's no obstacle. More interesting will be to see if environmental groups allow it. They hate science more than they love the environment.(1)

Yet most science is proof-of-concept. Doctors prefer to use Latin for diseases because it is a 'dead language, it is not being modified colloquially, and for proof-of-concept and how we can't always look down on it I use the fax machine, because it is also recognized but dead; the first fax machine cost a fortune to build and couldn't fax anyone else. Yet once its value was known they became free in printers.

So hemp biochar may be important for remediation but probably not PFAS. Like beef tallow 35 years ago, or eggs, PFAS are the targets of a culture war. Now we are told that fries with a hamburger are healthier than the vegetable oil activist epidemiologists claimed decades ago was going to save us from meat. 

It is the exact same methodology. And the exact same methodology that led epidemiologists to replicate "findings" that vaccines cause autism and weedkillers cause cancer; they take rows of inputs, like chemicals or foods, and then columns of diseases (or benefits, when they wanted to claim seed oils and Acai berries saved lives) and when they find "statistical signifiance" they publish it in a sympathetic journal like Environmental Health Perspectives.

If scientists can't find any science to back up the correlation, activist epidemiologists like Dr. Birnbaum or the rest of the Ramazzini Institute or IARC declare scientists have been bought off, or are just stupid.

Which means no matter how well hemp biochar may scale in the future it still faces two hurdles:

(1) In the future, PFAS will be exposed as an unscientific Cargo Cult belief, and companies are so jaded by that they won't want to invest in it unless the federal government mandates and subsidizes them, like taxpayer do with solar and ethanol.

(2) Environmentalists will hate it. They hate meat, but then turned Alternative Meat, because it uses science. Like they used to love hydroelectric power natural gas before they became entrenched enough their Predatorts could get settlements suing over.

Citation: Bui TH, Kaur M, Zuverza-Mena N, Nason SL, Dimkpa CO, et al. 2025. Iron-fortified hemp-derived biochar reduces per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances bioaccumulation in radish (Raphanus sativus L.). Environmental and Biogeochemical Processes 1: e010 https://www.maxapress.com/article/doi/10.48130/ebp-0025-0010

NOTE:

(1) This is $3 billion per year industry that decrees food grown using no pesticides can't be considered Organic™. Because it doesn't use soil, or the copper sulfate made by corporate heavy hitters in the organic industry. They have spent tens of millions of dollars blocking rice fortified with β-carotene. Which becomes vitamin A in the body. Because science can prevent blindness and death using food. 

Little wonder they also hate pasteurization and vaccines.

If they hate science more than they love poor brown and black kids you can be sure they will hate iron-fortified hemp.