Monitoring and Occurrence of PFAS in Drinking Water | AAAS EPI Center
While WTPs and WWTPs are designed to remove traditional contaminants, many are not equipped to reduce PFAS levels. PFAS continue to be cycled between various waters when they are not removed or destroyed.
Figure 4 - Simplified One Water Cycle Existing Data Can Help Determine a Community’s Risk of PFAS Contamination Existing PFAS occurrence data can help communities evaluate the risk of PFAS contamination in their water resources. Data sources include monitoring mandated or carried out by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 1 , state agencies 2 , utilities, and/or university researchers. In addition to the occurrence data, communities need information on potential sources of PFAS, including industrial production and use, airfields, and firefighting and fire training use. The EPA’s Third Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule (UCMR 3) provides sampling data from nationwide monitoring of treated drinking water (i.e., finished water) from public drinking water systems, primarily those that serve more than 10,000 individuals. Between 2013 and 2015, 36,000 samples obtained from the treated water of 4,920 public water systems (out of over 148,000 public water systems in the United States) were analyzed for a set of contaminants suspected to be present in drinking water but for which the EPA had not set health-based standards 3 . UCMR 3 included six well-known PFAS for monitoring, although many more PFAS may exist in the environment. Moreover, UCMR 3 reporting limits for these PFAS were relatively high (10 to 90 ng/L) compared to current analytical capabilities; therefore, PFAS that were reported as “not detected” still could have been present but at levels below detection limits at the time.
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