As the PFAS issue becomes more prevalent in national news, an increasing amounts of homeowners want to mitigate the threat of PFAS in their water supply. Even though fluorocarbons have many different forms, there are general PFAS solutions for drinking water that exist for the average homeowner. I’ll go over which viable solutions exist, and… Continue reading Household PFAS Treatment
Category: Testing
EPA National Testing Strategy
In October 2021, the EPA developed a new national testing strategy for PFAS that attempts to bypass some difficulties in screening for the thousands of PFAS in the environment. The EPA is now adopting a strategy of categorizing PFAS according to chemical structure and toxicity. In categorizing PFAS, EPA hopes to select a few specific… Continue reading EPA National Testing Strategy
Tutorial: How to collect home samples for EPA Method 537!
Last Monday (January 22, 2024), I collected water samples for LC-MS lab tests as part of my PFAS detection method research. Two (drinking water) of my five samples are to be processed through EPA Method 537. Today, having performed multiple sample collections, I would like to walk my readers through the process of collecting water… Continue reading Tutorial: How to collect home samples for EPA Method 537!
Why is it so hard to test for PFAS?
I was planning out research for a science fair competition, where I am going to be developing a new screening method for PFAS in water sources. Throughout its development, I will need to verify its accuracy as compared to current EPA methods. One of the stages of my project is collecting samples from a water… Continue reading Why is it so hard to test for PFAS?
Liquid Chromatography – in more detail
For the next couple of blog posts, I will be covering LC-MS in more detail, as it is a complex analytical technique that is hard to explain within a short blog post. I will start off with liquid chromatography (LC). Within the context of LC-MS, it is a technique that separates the components of a… Continue reading Liquid Chromatography – in more detail
PFAS testing methods
Up until the past decade, testing for PFAS in water has been unstandardized. The EPA released its first PFAS testing method in 2015, and released another method for short-chain PFAS in 2019. Both EPA methods use liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS), a complicated laboratory process that allows scientists to ascertain contents of a solution to a… Continue reading PFAS testing methods