The End of the PFAS Shell Game: How Nanobubbles and Photochemistry Are Breaking the Cycle

ODESSA, Fla. – September 28, 2026 — For decades, the global water treatment industry’s approach to toxic chemicals has largely resembled a high-stakes shell game. When a municipality filters per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) out of its drinking water, the chemicals do not simply vanish. They are trapped in granular activated carbon or ion-exchange resins, which are eventually hauled off to landfills or incinerators, only to inevitably seep back into the environment. We have not been eliminating our "forever chemicals"—we have merely been moving them around.

Today, StreamGo, a Florida-based provider of advanced water and wastewater treatment systems, announced a commercial milestone designed to end this perpetual cycle of liability. The company has officially launched a patent-pending, closed-loop treatment system that captures, concentrates, and completely destroys both long- and short-chain PFAS on-site.

Simultaneously, StreamGo announced the appointment of Steve Watzeck as its new Chief Executive Officer. Watzeck, a veteran executive who previously orchestrated the global scaling of Zenon Environmental’s breakthrough membrane technologies before its $656 million acquisition by GE Water, is stepping in to transition StreamGo from a period of intense research and development into a phase of aggressive commercial deployment.

As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) begins enforcing strict new 4.0 parts-per-trillion limits on primary PFAS compounds backed by nearly $1 billion in fresh federal funding, StreamGo’s integrated technology arrives at a critical inflection point for municipal and industrial water managers worldwide.

Moving Beyond the "Filter-and-Dump" Era

The fundamental flaw in conventional PFAS remediation is rooted in physical chemistry. Legacy adsorption media like carbon filters are highly effective at capturing long-chain PFAS compounds, but they struggle to retain short-chain homologues like PFBA and PFBS. These smaller, highly mobile compounds slip through traditional defenses and remain in the bulk water supply.

StreamGo’s solution begins with its proprietary NanoFoam™ technology. While conventional foam fractionation relies on microbubbles to separate hydrophobic long-chain PFAS by floating them to the surface, this method historically leaves short-chain chemicals behind. StreamGo alters this dynamic by introducing nanobubbles—bubbles measuring less than 200 nanometers in diameter.

Because of their microscopic size, nanobubbles possess massive surface-area-to-volume ratios, elevated internal pressures, and strong negative zeta potentials. When paired with trace conditioning agents, these nanobubbles create an electrostatic ion-pairing effect that forces even the most stubborn, hydrophilic short-chain PFAS to partition into the foam phase. The result is a capture efficiency that routinely exceeds 99 percent.

Crucially, NanoFoam also acts as a massive volume reducer. By skimming and collapsing the generated foam matrix, the system isolates the contaminant mass into a fraction of its original fluid volume. A 100,000-gallon wastewater stream is effectively shrunk into a 100-gallon concentrate.

"Using our proprietary nanobubbles in combination with the microbubbles typically used in foam fractionation allows us to capture short as well as long-chain PFAS with a smaller footprint and lower energy use," said Richard Nie, Founder, President, and CTO of StreamGo. "Then we take it a step further by integrating capture and destruction in one automated system. We’re giving customers a total solution to address PFAS rather than simply moving the problem somewhere else."

Smashing the Carbon-Fluorine Bond

Concentrating the chemicals is only half the battle; the true innovation lies in what happens to that 100-gallon residual stream. To destroy PFAS, one must break the carbon-fluorine bond, widely considered the strongest single bond in organic chemistry.

Many emerging destruction technologies rely on extreme brute force. Supercritical water oxidation (SCWO) requires temperatures exceeding 374 degrees Celsius and massive pressure, which can lead to severe equipment corrosion from the resulting hydrofluoric acid. Electrochemical oxidation, while effective, often generates hazardous secondary byproducts like toxic bromate and perchlorate from the background salts present in dirty water.

StreamGo’s EndStream™ technology takes a different approach: enhanced photochemical reduction. Operating at ambient temperature and pressure, the system utilizes short-wavelength ultraviolet light to activate hydrated electrons. These hydrated electrons act as ultra-strong reducing agents, systematically attacking the polarized carbon-fluorine bonds and initiating a stepwise defluorination process. The forever chemicals are quite literally unzipped, breaking down into harmless fluoride ions, water, and trace benign salts, without producing regulated oxohalide byproducts.

The historical barrier to photochemical reduction has always been energy cost. Treating millions of gallons of raw, dilute wastewater with UV light wastes massive amounts of photon energy on background organic matter. However, because StreamGo only applies EndStream to the 1,000x concentrated retentate produced by NanoFoam, the electrical energy required per order of destruction plummets, transforming a scientifically sound concept into an economically viable industrial solution.

The Landfill Frontline

The immediate proving ground for StreamGo’s integrated system is one of the most toxic and complex environments in the waste sector: landfill leachate.

As municipal wastewater treatment plants face stricter regulations, they are increasingly refusing to accept hauled leachate from solid waste facilities, fearing that the concentrated PFAS will contaminate their biosolids and trigger hazardous waste liabilities under CERCLA. Consequently, landfill operators are facing an existential crisis, with leachate hauling costs skyrocketing to over $0.40 per gallon in some regions.

StreamGo has already validated its technology in this grueling environment. In a commercial partnership with the Buffalo Sewer Authority, the company deployed a turnkey pre-treatment installation to handle raw leachate shipped from Seneca Meadows, New York State's largest municipal solid waste landfill. The influent leachate contained staggering total PFAS concentrations averaging around 30,000 parts per trillion. StreamGo’s system systematically reduced the regulated PFAS fractions to non-detectable levels below 0.04 parts per trillion, allowing the municipal biological processes to safely handle the remaining standard organic waste.

Similar automated field demonstrations have been successfully completed at Waste Management’s Bethel Landfill in Virginia—processing over 700,000 gallons over ten weeks with non-detect results for PFOS and PFOA—and at Casella Waste Systems’ Juniper Ridge Landfill in Maine, proving the system's tolerance to high-solids environments without catastrophic membrane fouling.

Beyond landfills, StreamGo has demonstrated its engineering durability in pristine, high-stakes environments. Following historic 500-year flooding that devastated infrastructure in Montana and Wyoming, the company designed, fabricated, and installed a 900,000-gallon-per-day containerized membrane bioreactor system at Yellowstone National Park. Commissioned at an elevation of 6,735 feet during sub-zero winter conditions, the system successfully delivered reuse-quality water, protecting the park's fragile aquatic ecosystems.

The Veteran Playbook for Scaling

Developing a breakthrough water technology is one thing; scaling it into a global industrial standard is entirely another. This is the specific expertise Steve Watzeck brings to StreamGo.

Watzeck’s track record is a blueprint for crossing the notorious "valley of death" in cleantech commercialization. As President and Senior Vice President of Zenon Environmental, he was instrumental in transforming the company's ZeeWeed ultrafiltration membranes from an early-stage engineering novelty into the dominant global standard for municipal membrane bioreactors. Following Zenon’s acquisition, he managed the structural integration of the platform into GE Water & Process Technologies. Most recently, as CEO of Fibracast, he led the global expansion of its hybrid membrane technology, culminating in a $44.6 million growth equity round in late 2023.

"StreamGo has invested years developing, demonstrating and validating proprietary technologies for some of the most difficult challenges including emerging contaminants and reuse in water treatment," Watzeck noted in today's announcement. "We have the engineering expertise and treatment capabilities to address the most complex waste streams including broad spectrum PFAS from beginning to end – and we’re ready to commercially scale across verticals from municipal to military."

With StreamGo showcasing full-scale NanoFoam and EndStream equipment this week at WEFTEC 2026 in New Orleans and SWANA RCon 2026 in St. Louis, the company is projecting significant triple-digit revenue growth through 2027. If their field data continues to hold up at scale, the water industry may finally have a tool to stop moving its problems from one landfill to another, and start eliminating them for good.