SourceKill™ was featured in NASAs Spinoff magazine!
Toxicological & Environmental Associates Inc. developed SourceKill using a non-exclusive license for NASA’s eco-friendly EZVI technology to reduce on-site chemicals to their harmless components.
Referencing from NASA Spinoff 2022 article:
At 5:12 a.m. on Sept. 28, 1982, a train derailed near Livingston, Louisiana, waking residents nearby to the sound of explosions and raging fires. What the residents didn’t see until later were the thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals – 27 train cars’ worth – soaking the ground, polluting soil and groundwater alike. The town spent millions of dollars, and more than 30 years, using well-known remediation techniques to attempt to clean up the spill, but the toxic chemicals remained at levels high enough to keep the area perennially on the Environmental Protection Agency’s list of “brownfields,” or contaminated properties. In 2013, the town was ready for something new.
It turned to a unique environmental remediation technology first created at NASA in 2002 to safely destroy chemical contamination left over from the early days of the space program. Called emulsified zero-valent iron (EZVI), the formula has become one of the space agency’s most far-reaching success stories (Spinoff 2005, 2010). The two related patents have been licensed more than a dozen times by private companies, which have in turn cleaned up contamination across the United States and around the world. This innovative technology has made it possible, for the first time, to eliminate chlorinated chemicals left deep in soil and aquifers by dye and paint manufacturers, dry cleaners, chemical manufacturers, metal cleaning and degreasing facilities, electronics companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and more.
October 2021 marked a significant milestone as the technology turned 20 and the patents expired, leaving behind a significant legacy of companies that have successfully manufactured the technology for more than a decade. Mini-Bioreactors “If you’re aware that you may have any potentially contaminated sites, by law you’re required to go investigate,” said Jackie Quinn. An environment engineer at the time with NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Quinn also served as the project lead for EZVI development. The law she was referring to was the 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which prompted NASA’s review of potentially hazardous sites. One such site was Kennedy’s historic Launch Complex 34, where thousands of gallons of chlorinated solvents had soaked into the ground during the Apollo program. Chlorinated solvents, which NASA used to clean rocket engine components, were once thought to be harmless but are now known toxins and carcinogens – and are difficult to eliminate. Only slightly soluble in water, and much heavier, they sink below the water table and settle into tiny cracks and spaces among the rocks and soil, making them virtually impossible to find and remove. They’re also persistent, barely breaking down over time. As they mingle with water, they can threaten local wildlife and contaminate drinking water. So Quinn and Kathleen Brooks Loftin, a NASA analytical chemist at the time and now Kennedy’s chief technologist, partnered with the University of Central Florida to find a way to break down these chemicals across a vast area without causing any additional environmental damage. They came up with a combination of emulsified vegetable oil, water, and microscopic iron particles.
It was revolutionary. “We create an oil bubble around a little bit of water with iron in it,” explained Quinn. “Each one of those bubbles is like a little micro-reactor.” The vegetable oil attracts the hydrophobic chemicals, drawing them in. Concentration gradients then push the toxins from the oil into the water, where the iron spurs a reaction that degrades the molecules into by-products that are expelled from the bubble. Then the process repeats, over and over, for decades if necessary, until no toxins remain
It was clear EZVI would be useful outside NASA, so the Kennedy Technology Transfer Office jumped into action to get it into the hands of private companies.
The Florida sites where NASA and the U.S. Air Force tested the new technology – Launch Complex 34 and nearby Patrick Air Force Base – saw dramatic reductions of contamination within a few months. Cheaper, Faster, and More Effective It was clear EZVI would be useful outside NASA, so the Kennedy Technology Transfer Office jumped into action to get it into the hands of private companies. Along with the patent license, Quinn showed some early adopters how to reproduce the correct formula. Toxicological & Environmental Associates Inc, the company that brought EZVI to the Livingston site, used the NASA training and insight to scale up the manufacturing needed for thousands of gallons of its EZVI product, called Sourcekill. The company also had to figure out the best methods for injecting the emulsion into different soil conditions such as sand, silt, and clay. “The delivery of the EZVI was going to be a big issue,” said Brad Droy, CEO of TEA. “How do you get it to effectively distribute throughout the contaminated area?” Over time the company, working with injection experts, developed best practice methodologies for soil mixing in shallow soils and for hydraulic fracturing in silts, clays, and fractured rock. TEA now both manufactures EZVI for other companies and uses it with its own remediation customers. The company has supplied or injected several hundred thousand gallons of EZVI for projects in 15 states in the United States as well as Canada, Australia, and Japan. Applying EZVI can be done in a matter of days or weeks, with positive results seen typically within three to six months, making it far less costly than treatments that can take decades. “This remediation technique destroys the source material that causes the contamination, so it’s a cheaper, more effective solution,” said Droy.