Representatives from Gradiant say their ForeverGone product, a 2025 Edison Awards gold winner, can both remove and destroy the potentially harmful chemicals found all over.
Katerina Dobbins, left, and Steven Lam, right, of Gradiant talk about ForeverGone at their innovators’ showcase booth at the 2025 Edison Awards.
FORT MYERS, Fla. — Gradiant’s multiaward-winning ForeverGone product looks like a shipping container. But its process of removing and destroying – not just containing – a group of synthetic, potentially harmful chemicals is most important to the product’s solution for people.
ForeverGone won gold in the Water & Environmental Sustainability category at the 2025 Edison Awards, an event established in 1987 honoring “excellence in new product and service development, marketing, design and innovation.” U.S. News is a media partner for the Edison Awards.
Steven Lam, the head of technology at Gradiant, a Boston-headquartered water company, describes ForeverGone as an “all-in-one solution” to both remove and destroy the group of chemicals, known as PFAS, from drinking water. He notes the product’s May 2024 launch coincided with Environmental Protection Agency regulations that went into effect the month prior tied to PFAS, which are used in a wide variety of household products and industrial processes and are often described as “forever chemicals” because some don’t degrade naturally.
“PFAS is just a ubiquitous issue,” Lam says.
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Lam and Katerina Dobbins, Gradiant’s director of investor relations, both spoke with U.S. News at the Edison Awards about ForeverGone’s process and how it can make a difference – from both an environmental and health perspective. Dobbins notes in a follow-up email, for example, that studies show “many newborns have detectable levels of PFAS in their blood stream due to in utero exposure.”
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why is PFAS a bad thing?
Lam: “PFAS are considered persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic chemicals, or PBT. Because PFAS is so stable, it means it’s persistent in the environment. It’s bioaccumulating. So, once it gets in the food chain at the smaller levels, it just concentrates to the higher levels. And because humans are at the top of the food chain, it bioaccumulates in the human body. Then lastly, it’s toxic in very, very low concentrations.”
Gradiant
Steven Lam is the head of technology at Gradiant.
How does ForeverGone work?
Lam: “ForeverGone has two parts. It’s a micro-foam fractionation to separate the PFAS out of the water, and then we concentrate it about 100,000 times, and then we send it to electro-oxidation to destroy the PFAS. We’re essentially using electricity to break down the PFAS molecules into fluoride ions.”
How is this helping people?
Lam: “It’s in all drinking water at this point. If you don’t fix the problem of PFAS, then people are going to have a lot of health effects from just drinking PFAS in the drinking water. So what Gradiant does is try to remove it at the source.”
What are some of your short-term and long-term goals with this product?
Lam: “Short goal is to remove PFAS out of the wastewater, so this way PFAS can’t pollute your drinking water if it’s already being treated at the source.”
Gradiant
Katerina Dobbins is the director of investor relations at Gradiant.
Dobbins: “The long-term goal would be to have our PFAS technology deployed at every municipal facility in the U.S., in Europe, to completely destroy PFAS. We’re starting in the industrial space, because that’s where Gradiant’s kind of bread and butter is to date.
“Then, after that’s been proven at a large commercial scale, the goal is to go to municipalities, because that’s where the majority of PFAS is. It’s in the municipal water streams, but there’s still a lot of PFAS in industry.”
Anything else you think is important to note for readers about ForeverGone?
Lam: “Treating PFAS takes continuous innovation. Today, treating PFAS in most technologies isn’t possible. We have a technology that can do it, that can do it cheaply, but in the future, we have to make even more innovations and make it even more cost-effective, so this way it can be applied just generically in each type of drinking water.”
Dobbins: “No other company can remove and destroy PFAS. So our solution combines both of those together.”
And why is that?
Dobbins: “The destruction piece is the most challenging that we’ve been able to innovate.
“You can remove the PFAS, but then you would just dump that in the landfill, and that’s not solving a problem.”
Why do you think it’s important to be here at the Edison Awards?
Lam: “The product was developed quite quickly. It started in 2018, but most of the development was in the last two or three years to fully commercialize this. It was a small team that worked really hard to do it. So by coming to the Edison Awards, by being recognized by the community, it shows that their efforts are being appreciated – from our company standpoint, but from the larger community as well.”
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