IBA joins PFAROS consortium to test electron beam PFAS destruction

Ion Beam Applications (IBA), the Belgian particle accelerator specialist listed on Euronext, has joined PFAROS, a newly launched European research and innovation consortium tasked with reducing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substance (PFAS) emissions from healthcare and pharmaceutical applications. IBA will co-lead the initiative's end-of-life and waste-management workstream alongside Bayer, with the University of Ghent serving as academic coordinator across the wider project.

PFAS, a broad family of highly persistent fluorinated compounds used extensively in medical device coatings, pharmaceutical packaging, and sterilisation processes, have attracted escalating regulatory scrutiny in Europe and the United States. Their chemical stability, which makes them useful industrially, also renders conventional wastewater treatment largely ineffective at removing them, creating a growing environmental and public health challenge for the healthcare supply chain.

IBA's technical role

IBA will deploy its Discovery Lab innovation unit and its proprietary Rhodotron electron beam technology to test and benchmark destruction methods for PFAS found in hospital and pharmaceutical wastewater. The scope covers long-, short- and ultrashort-chain PFAS variants, with objectives spanning pre-concentration, polishing, and advanced destruction processes aimed at achieving full mineralisation and by-product control. For solid waste streams, PFAROS will separately assess thermal and non-thermal approaches, including pyrolysis, gasification, electron beam, and plasma treatments, at lab scale before evaluating scalability.

Catherine Vandenborre, Chief Ventures and Corporate Officer at IBA, described the project as "an important collaborative initiative to better understand how PFAS emissions and exposure concerns can be addressed across the healthcare and pharmaceutical value chains," and said the company's aim is to help generate data that can inform future industrial and regulatory decision-making.

PFAROS is funded through the Innovative Health Initiative Joint Undertaking (IHI JU), a public-private partnership operating under the European Union's Horizon Europe framework and backed by industry associations including EFPIA, MedTech Europe, and Vaccines Europe. The consortium spans 91 partners drawn from industry, academia, healthcare, regulatory bodies, and civil society.

Regulatory and market context

The timing is significant. The European Chemicals Agency's proposed universal PFAS restriction, one of the broadest in regulatory history, is advancing through assessment, and the European Parliament has signalled support for a phased ban on non-essential uses. Healthcare and pharmaceutical exemptions are expected to be fiercely contested given the difficulty of substituting PFAS in certain critical applications, but regulators have made clear that end-of-life management and waste destruction will need to meet rising standards regardless of whether upstream exemptions are granted.

For IBA, participation in PFAROS represents a measured extension of its core accelerator business into environmental remediation, a growing adjacent market. The company's Rhodotron platform is already deployed in industrial sterilisation, and electron beam treatment of contaminated effluent has been demonstrated at pilot scale in other industrial sectors. Whether the technology can be made economically viable at the volumes generated by hospital and pharmaceutical manufacturing remains an open question that PFAROS is, in part, designed to answer.

Several other technology providers, including plasma-based treatment companies and advanced oxidation specialists, are competing to establish credible PFAS destruction pathways ahead of expected regulatory mandates. IBA's co-leadership role in PFAROS, alongside a large pharmaceutical partner in Bayer, gives it a meaningful seat at the table as the evidence base for regulatory and procurement decisions is assembled.