PFAS have earned the name “forever chemicals” with good reason—the man-made compounds, which can take thousands of years to degrade and are found in everything from grease-resistant food packaging to water-repellent clothing, have made their way into nearly half the U.S. tap water supply.
Now, in a study featured in the Journal of Hazardous Materials, New Jersey Institute of Technology chemists have demonstrated a new lab-based method to detect traces of PFAS from food packaging material, water and soil samples in just three minutes or less.
Researchers say their approach could significantly speed up efforts to study and address the bioaccumulation of PFAS in the environment, including more than $2 billion of EPA grant funding from President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for states to conduct water quality testing and treatment for the emerging contaminants.
“There are thousands of different species of PFAS, but we’ve yet to understand the extent of their distribution in our environment because the current testing methods are costly and time-consuming, taking hours for sample preparation and analysis in some cases,” said Hao Chen, the study’s corresponding author and NJIT chemistry professor. “What our study demonstrates is a much faster, sensitive and versatile method that can monitor our drinking water, land and consumer products for contamination in minutes.”
Chen and colleagues say the new method—involving an ionization technique for analyzing the molecular composition of sample materials called