There are more than 68 million homes in the US that have leaded plumbing components or receive water through lead municipal pipes, and numerous incidents (Flint, Newark) have demonstrated that mass lead exposure can occur for years despite regulations that require water testing. Analysis of drinking water is carried out by water companies and state officials using expensive instrumentation (ICP-OES or ICP-MS), which requires shipment of water samples to central lab facilities. Commercial versions of the ICP water test cost $30-$40 per sample. The EPA limit for lead in drinking water is 15 ppb, a challenging target for field screening technologies. We have developed an inexpensive kit for home sampling of lead in drinking water that can quantify lead with a linear range of 5-100 ppb. The kit is easy to use: a 2L soda bottle is filled with a first-flush water sample, which is then poured out through a filter cap. The kit works by preconcentrating the lead on an activated carbon filter. The filter can be screened on the spot (wet) with a portable X-ray fluorometer (XRF), or mailed to a lab for a more sensitive quantitative assay. Simply drying the filter in a 100C oven increases signal strength by a factor of 10, allowing quantification down to low ppb levels of lead in the water sample. For confirmatory analysis, the lead can be eluted from the filter with 5% nitric acid and sent to ICP.<br/><br/>Here we report results from a large scale field test of the filter caps. Over the month of October and November of 2019, a hundred students at a New York high school assembled 500 caps and then collected water samples that they filtered at the high school. The filters were dried and mailed to a lab at Notre Dame for quantitative XRF analysis. A subset of water samples were analyzed by ICP.

Got lead? Low-cost analysis of lead in drinking water by preconcentration on a carbon felt filter

Macromolecular Chemistry: The Second Century

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ACS Spring 2020 National Meeting & Expo

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.