Our waterways are becoming more and more polluted due to PFAS, plastics, medicines, drugs, and new chemicals made by companies that just hand over the responsibility of cleaning to plants paid for by public moneys. Detecting the different chemicals and filtering them out if getting harder and harder. Could the simple solution of heating up past a point where even PFAS/forever chemicals decomposes (400C for PFAS, 500C to be more sure about other stuff) be alright?
You could always regulate and ban toxics at the point of production or sale, before they get into the waste stream
Yeah, sure, but regulation needs enforcement and countries are pretty lax on that. Just look at England that was dumping toxins into rivers for decades and recently raised the allowed levels in order to continue doing so. If there were a way to go “whatever, all you need to do is install this and you can dump as much as you like because it won’t end up in the water anyway” wouldn’t that be preferable?
Barring the fact that most pollutants aren’t that easy to deal with, I don’t think so. I think you’d suffer from a kind of Jevon’s Paradox of toxicity, where people would just dump more in, until whatever “ok” threshold previously existed would be breached, and you’d be left in the same situation, just systematically worse.