Lead, bacteria and PFAS are among the contaminants cropping up in drinking water. Most water treatment plants are not set up to remove more modern contaminants, such as PFAS, pharmaceutical drugs and endocrine disrupting chemicals, said Detlef Knappe (Admin Core and Project 4), a professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering at North Carolina State University, who was one of the first to publish on the Wilmington PFAS problem. “Often, things go wrong because of just underinvestment into this type of infrastructure,” Dr. Knappe said. “The rate at which we’re replacing the distribution system pipes in the network is not keeping up with the rate at which the system really needs to be maintained.”
Home filters appear to work decently well for PFAS and can now be NSF/ANSI Standard 53 certified for some of those chemicals, too. In a study published in 2020, Dr. Knappe and his co-authors found that, on average, pitcher and refrigerator filters that use activated carbon reduced PFAS levels by about 50 percent. More advanced filtration systems that use a process known as reverse osmosis were over 90 percent effective, but they are much more expensive and waste a significant amount of water. Sometimes filters can cause more harm than good. Click HERE to read more.