Editor’s note: This series profiles six of the Seattle region’s “Uncommon Thinkers”: inventors, scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs transforming industries and driving positive change in the world. They will be recognized Dec. 11 at the GeekWire Gala. Uncommon Thinkers is presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners.

After earning his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, Brian Pinkard spent six months “flipping rocks,” as he describes it, in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.

The rock-flipping was purposeful work: Pinkard was clearing obstructions and building trails for AmeriCorps, spending every night in a tent.

“I loved it. It was great. And the reason I did that is because I wanted to do something that mattered, that made a difference in the world,” he said. When the program ended, he was inspired to direct his impact to a larger environmental challenge.

His passion to do good, paired with an engineer’s drive for problem solving, led him to a doctoral degree from the University of Washington and then to launching Aquagga, a startup that’s destroying PFAS — a toxic class of pollutants known as “forever chemicals.”

“Brian has been very laser focused on his mission,” said Igor Novosselov, Pinkard’s PhD advisor and research professor at the UW’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “He’s not a typical scientist who would just go and write a bunch of papers. He’s going after impact where it matters.”

But a few steps before PFAS, Pinkard was focused on nerve gas in the Middle East.

‘Nobody knows how to treat this stuff‘

When Pinkard joined Novosselov’s lab, it had U.S. Department of Defense funding to develop an in-the-field, mobile strategy for treating barrels of abandoned chemical weapons in the Syrian desert. The previous solution was to truck the barrels to the Mediterranean Sea, load them on a boat and incinerate the material.

“If you’re the guy who’s got to transport a nerve agent,” Pinkard noted, “it’s not a very good job.”

Within five years, the lab came up with a workable solution, but the need was no longer urgent and DoD shelved its application of the technology, though Novosselov continued to work on it.

Pinkard appreciated the tremendous power of the strategy for treating dangerous materials and wondered if there was another use case. Then as he was preparing to finish his PhD in June 2020, the COVID pandemic hit, derailing his plans to apply for a university postdoctoral fellowship as no one was hiring.

So he made a pivot to entrepreneurship — a role he had never considered.

Pinkard teamed up with engineer and tech innovator Nigel Sharp to explore the potential for using the tech, called supercritical water oxidation, to treat sewage sludge from wastewater treatment plants, but they realized the market wasn’t viable.

There was, however, buzz about PFAS.

“Everybody was talking about PFAS,” he said, and if anyone could figure out how to destroy the chemicals, it would be a breakthrough. That realization became his lightbulb moment.

Destroying PFAS

PFAS is a family of chemicals that for decades have been added to firefighting foams, food packaging, carpets and fabrics, water-repellent clothing and non-stick pans. The resilient chemicals are great at deflecting water, stains and grease — but they escape from products and now contaminate drinking water across the nation and are even in mothers’ breast milk.

PFAS are still in use, while researchers and regulators are increasingly concerned by their serious health impacts.

Pinkard and Sharp launched Aquagga in 2019 in Tacoma, Wash., and were soon joined by co-founder Chris Woodruff. The team kept the idea of modular treatment units but shifted to a related but different chemistry (hydrothermal alkaline treatment) for destroying PFAS, securing a patent for the approach from the Colorado School of Mines.

“Brian has been a great partner from the beginning,” said Timothy Strathmann, a Colorado School of Mines professor. “Unlike many entrepreneurs I’ve interacted with, he is also deeply interested in understanding the limitations and technical challenges associated with the technology. He’s keenly aware that the long-term success of Aquagga will only be achieved by addressing the critical barriers to deployment.”

Aquagga’s devices annihilates PFAS under super hot, high pressure conditions made caustic and corrosive through the addition of lye.

The company has done nine field demonstrations of its technology, including a project at an airport in Alaska, a DoD-funded project in North Carolina involving firefighting foams, and a wastewater demo with the City of Tacoma. It’s now close to signing its first long-term commercial deployment, Pinkard said, “which will be a huge milestone for us.”

“It’s really cool to see how much PFAS we’ve destroyed … even in our short journey,” Pinkard said. “And to think about where it could go, what it could enable at scale. So [I’m] very optimistic about Aquagga’s future. I’m very optimistic about the impact we could create, the lives we could save.”