Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a class of thousands of chemicals that has been ubiquitously used in industrial manufacturing processes and in consumer products. PFAS share similar chemical structures, including strong C-F bonds, hydrophilic functional groups, and hydrophobic alkyl chains, which make many of them desirable surfactants and water soluble. Due to their widespread applications, most PFAS ultimately end up in landfills, and due to their water-soluble properties, most PFAS leach into ground water and pollute drinking water supplies. In addition, all PFAS are well-known for their extreme environmental persistence, and many bioaccumulate and display toxicity, and several have been associated with adverse human health effects in areas with contaminated drinking water.  To help assess how impacted our drinking water supplies are by PFAS currently, we have developed a rapid and low-cost solid-phase extraction method using a graphitized activated carbon felt to preconcentrate and capture PFAS from drinking water samples. When this method is combined with particle-induced gamma-ray emission (PIGE) spectroscopy, we show that it is possible to rapidly screen for total absorbable organic fluorine (AOF) in aqueous samples. Not only is the experimental setup simple and practical for field sampling, but the analysis is rapid and allows the quantitative measurement of total AOF as a surrogate for PFAS in drinking water. Since real-world water samples could be treated with inorganic fluoride, we also show that a methanol rinse method can be used to distinguish between inorganic fluoride and organic fluorine signal in PIGE. Those filters that show high levels of AOF can be rinsed off their PFAS and analyzed for specific PFAS via traditional Liquid-Chromatography tandem Mass Spectrometry analysis (LC-MS/MS) using EPA Method 537.1. The first application of this novel PFAS screening method in northern Indian drinking water will be presented, where the drinking water samples were collected from public water supplies and analyzed in our laboratory. These screening method results are compared with traditional LC-MS/MS methods to evaluate the efficiency for screening various PFAS analytes in northern Indiana drinking water supplies.

PFAS screening survey in northern Indiana drinking water

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