Stoiber and her colleagues at EWG keep watch over the consumer-grade water filtration programs accessible within the US. The group’s exams have discovered that widespread pitcher filters from manufacturers resembling Brita and Berkey don’t all take away PFAS equally effectively. However some do a wonderful job, primarily based on EWG’s exams, together with the pitcher filter system made by Epic Water Filters, a US-based agency.
“I might say PFAS is by far the primary contaminant that we’re getting suggestions for our prospects worrying about,” says Joel Stevens, cofounder of Epic Water Filters. The filters his firm makes for its water pitchers embody a carbon block. “Hundreds upon hundreds of layers of carbon fibers which are wrapped round a block,” he explains. Because the water trickles by way of these fibers, the carbon takes off PFAS and different contaminants, together with chlorine and lead.
In about three months’ time, the corporate will launch a brand new pitcher filter that may additionally take out heavy metals and fluoride. Fluoride is added to water in some areas with the intention to enhance dental well being, although some folks would favor to not drink it due to a possible hyperlink between fluoride and adversarial neurological results. Scientific evaluation suggests that the chance from faucet water in international locations such because the US, nevertheless, is extraordinarily low.
Whereas there are some very efficient water filter merchandise available on the market, says Stoiber, many individuals nonetheless throw spent filters within the trash, which implies they in the end find yourself at landfill websites the place the PFAS can leach out into the atmosphere once more.
Clients of Epic Water Filters can return their spent filters to the corporate. “The filters are then despatched to a particular recycling heart the place the plastic is recycled and the inner filters are incinerated,” says Stevens in a follow-up e mail.
Stoiber’s analysis means that some types of incineration of PFAS supplies can launch dangerous compounds into the atmosphere. “We nonetheless don’t have good disposal suggestions for spent remedy media,” she says. It’s attainable to interrupt PFAS compounds down, although, at extraordinarily excessive temperatures, whilst excessive as 1,500 levels Celsius (2,730 F). Some researchers are at the moment exploring how chemical components resembling granular activated carbon may scale back the quantity of warmth required to interrupt down PFAS compounds.
There’s one other downside with present approaches to PFAS. “Group-level consuming water remedy is what’s wanted at this level, as a result of the prices shouldn’t fall on the person,” says Stoiber. “It shouldn’t be unfair, who has a filter, who doesn’t, who will get uncovered.”
Whereas some US consuming water services are actually putting in large-scale PFAS filtration expertise, resembling in Tampa, Florida, the price of doing this throughout the nation may spiral into the billions, in line with some analyses. Whereas Stoiber says the simplest technique for avoiding PFAS contamination is to not use these chemical compounds within the first place, numerous firms nonetheless do, and it may very well be a very long time earlier than they disappear solely from client merchandise, if that ever occurs.
For now, there’s a danger that the Trump administration may weaken the brand new US water laws that demand the elimination of some PFAS molecules from faucet water provides, says Stoiber. “We’re combating to guard the consuming water legal guidelines that have been simply handed,” she says. “I believe all eyes are on that.”
