How to Get PFAS Out of Drinking Water--and Keep It Out

[littlemissmartypants]

Chris Baraniuk
Science
Feb 12, 2025 6:30 AM

How to Get PFAS Out of Drinking Water—and Keep It Out
Filters in water pitchers or under-sink systems capture dangerous chemicals, only for them to be returned to the environment. A researcher from North Carolina is pioneering a new system that could get rid of forever chemicals forever.

There’s something scary in the water at Cape Fear. For years, chemicals giant DuPont and the company Chemours, which it spun off in 2015, manufactured long-lasting synthetic chemicals—known as forever chemicals—that made their way into the environment in this corner of North Carolina, ultimately ending up in the Cape Fear River. This is one of America’s PFAS hot spots, though forever chemicals are also found in tap water in thousands of locations around the US. (DuPont has been involved in several class action lawsuits across the United States related to the chemicals since the early 2000s.)

Specifically, DuPont and Chemours had used PFAS, or perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, for making Teflon, widely used in nonstick cookware. But, in the process, they contaminated the groundwater. Tests have shown that drinking water in this part of North Carolina can have levels of PFAS many times higher than the federal limit. The health effects of PFAS are frightening—from increasing your risk of cancer and obesity to lowering fertility.

“North Carolina’s still dealing with that,” says Jordan Poler, a chemistry professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “It’s a huge challenge for the people here.” Charlotte is more than 100 miles from the Cape Fear River, and the tap water there is fairly safe, says Poler. But hurricanes sometimes redistribute contaminated water in his direction. It’s partly what inspired him to come up with a new PFAS filtration system—and one with a key difference from existing systems.

“A lot of these media, you throw them in the landfill and they’re just going to leach everything back out,” he says ...
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https://archive.ph/z7pNx

❤️pants

[Ocelot II]

1. With a Trump stooge in charge of the EPA we'll be lucky

if the worst thing in our drinking water is PFAS and not raw sewage. Welcome back, cholera.

[WestMichRad]

2. The copied paragraphs miss the gist of the article.

Dr. Poole notes there are three methods for removing PFAS components from water: reverse osmosis through a semipermeable membrane (which is energy intensive), activated carbon filtration (like that done with water pitchers), and ion exchange. With the first two methods, the captured material (here, PFAS compounds) can leach out of disposed materials and re-enter the environment. With ion exchange, the captured substance can be deliberately washed out and destroyed, and the ion exchange substrate re-activated and reused.

They are examining the use of zeolites (naturally occurring minerals) as the ion exchange substrate, getting good results and finding the removal of adsorbed PFAS and regeneration of the zeolites is easily done. Methods exist to decompose recovered PFAS compounds, with heat and pressure.

They apparently plan to market pitcher filters using this technology. The company name is Epic Water Filters. Consumers will be able to return spent filters to the company for recovery.

[littlemissmartypants]

3. Copyright law & DU TOS... 🤷‍♀️

And that's why links are useful. 😉

❤️