Between 97 and 99 percent of all humans have measurable levels of PFAS in their blood. Every major watershed on Earth has tested positive, including the Arctic and Antarctica.
Until recently, every technology designed to address that contamination just moved it somewhere else. Alec Ajnsztajn is trying to end that, by destroying the molecules entirely.
As co-founder and CEO of CoFlux Purification, Alec is commercializing a covalent organic framework reactor that captures PFAS and then destroys the carbon-fluoride bonds under UV light, converting the molecules into fluoride and CO2. No concentrated waste. No hazmat landfill. No incineration truck. The contamination is gone.
What we cover:
Why PFAS compounds are nearly indestructible: carbon-fluoride bonds are among the strongest in organic chemistry, which made them invaluable from Manhattan Project equipment to Teflon cookware to semiconductor photoresists, and also why they accumulate in human tissue indefinitely.
How every mainstream treatment technology today (granular activated carbon, ion exchange resins) concentrates PFAS rather than eliminating it, and why that concentrated waste still has to be incinerated or injected underground.
Why CoFlux is starting upstream at contaminated aquifers, AFFF foam change-outs at airports and military bases, and industrial wastewater, rather than at the drinking water tap, where new materials face the highest regulatory bar.
How the Department of Defense's March 2025 guidance carved out an explicit procurement pathway for novel PFAS destruction technologies, and why that distinction between a paid pilot and a real contract is the difference between runway and revenue.
Why scaling PFAS capture nationally on granular activated carbon effectively means scaling coal mining, and what it would take for regulations to create on-ramps for destruction technology before the market ratifies incumbents for another generation.
The physics of a deep-tech startup: CoFlux was built out of Alec's PhD and postdoctoral work at Rice University alongside co-founders Jeremy Daum and Dana, and after roughly two years of materials science development, the company's first field skid is heading to a government site in New Mexico this summer.
Alec Ajnsztajn is the co-founder and CEO of CoFlux Purification, an Activate fellow company developing a covalent organic framework reactor that captures and destroys PFAS in contaminated water streams.
He holds a Ph.D. from Rice University, where his work on porous photocatalytic polymers became the scientific foundation for CoFlux.
Robert Caro's "The Power Broker" on how infrastructure gets built, who gets to decide, and what happens when accountability disappears from that process. Alec read it in high school, again in college, and says it still shapes how he thinks about where CoFlux fits into a 30 to 40 year infrastructure transition.
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