Almost none of us has seen the chemical element fluorine in its pure form, though its compounds are prominent in our lives, often unfortunately.
That said, I was entranced by fluorine in the powerful hydrofluoric acid that I obtained as a 10-year-old budding chemist. I didn’t know more than a few of the 10,000 chemicals now made with fluorine – slippery Teflon, yes, but not the many other “forever chemicals” such as the notorious perfluoroalkyls or PFAs now indicted, we may say, for polluting our waters and even our bodies.
Why “forever?” Well, fluorine is extremely reactive chemically, and that goes along with forming very strong bonds with other chemical elements. The bond that fluorine makes with carbon is stronger than any bond that other elements can make to carbon.
There’s more to the story. If we want our friendly microbes in soil, wetlands, water purification plants, etc. to break down unwanted chemicals, those microbes must have had experience over evolutionary time with chemicals that have the bonds we want broken. Alas, only about 30 natural chemicals have a C-F bond. The most notorious, fortunately rare, is fluoroacetate. It’s a very potent toxin in locoweed.
So, we’re really short of microbes to help us with Teflon, PFAs, and so on. We’ll be living with them the rest of our lives, and lives of our children, and our children’s children …
This is an outreach activity of the Las Cruces Academy, viewable at GreatSchools.org
