Blood serum PFAS concentrations thankfully have been decreasing over time. It's probably not worth getting yours tested unless you had some specific exposure other than consumer goods. You should ask your doctor, if you have one.
R with the tidyverse package is amazing once you get over the learning curve. It's so much easier to simply type a few lines of code then to fiddle with the Excel GUI, plus the ability to customize the plot is much, much better in R.
Yes making a simple plot in Excel is relatively easy, but try making something evening remotely complex and it's terrible. A box plot is a great example of this, 2 lines of plotting code in R for a basic plot but an absolute nightmare to create in Excel.
As stated in the article, this isn't a big problem for communities with centralized water treatment systems, rather for individual homes drinking well water which is contaminated by agriculture.
In a municipal treatment plant you have a few options for removing nitrates including reverse osmosis (membrane filters with very small pores, allowing them to reject very small molecules), ion exchange (swap nitrate with another, less harmful ion), or biological treatment (use microorganisms to turn nitrate into nitrogen gas).
In your home, reverse osmosis is really the only feasible option, which can be expensive to install and costly to maintain. Ideally, some sort of tax on fertilizer would be used to pay for these in house treatments, but that would increase the cost of food.
My partner has Aphantasia. Brains are strange! She cannot visualize in her mind which makes it very challenging to do certain tasks and many things she does are based on muscle memory. Also interestingly when a song gets stuck in her head it is like she is making all of the sounds with her inner voice. For me, I can hear the song like there is a recording playing in my head.
I'm a water engineer with a PhD, so not a tech nerd but definitely a nerd :) I came here mostly because I find the Reddit app annoying and the app I was using came here.
I don't know the details about alum production (assuming that is what you are referring to), but there are many alternative coagulants available now. Sure the supply logistics would be incredibly challenging and many people would have to boil their water or use point-of-use filters, but this take is pretty doomer in my opinion. Most plants use alum because it's cheap and easy, not because it's their only option.
Systems that were already using activated carbon or ion exchange for organics removal may have some treatment capacity, but otherwise the first systems specifically for treating drinking water are being designed and constructed now. There are contaminated sites that already have treatment or containment in place.
This is very interesting. Currently, most ion exchange systems that remove PFAS have to dispose of their brine as hazardous waste, which is very costly and doesn't necessarily destroy PFAS - in Florida, for example, they inject the brine into a deep aquifer.
A lot of novel technologies target PFAS destruction in these concentrated waste streams, but often further concentration is required before you can effectively destroy PFAS with advanced oxidation processes. If they could use low-UV to destroy it without further concentration or additional chemicals (beside the salt already used to regenerate the resin), ion exchange would become a much better solution for treated PFAS contaminated water.
It's "forever" in the environmental sense that they don't break down naturally (or at least very, very slowly). That said, "forever chemicals" is more of a media buzzword than a term that scientists use.
I wrote about half of my thesis in R Markdown using Git to backup my work. It's fantastic because you can have your plots and statistics integrated directly into your paper and formatting in Markdown is much easier than straight up latex.
Water is disinfected with either chlorine, chloramine (ammonia + chlorine), ozone, or UV light. In North America chlorine is almost universal because it provides disinfection residual, which keeps water safe while it is travelling from the treatment plant to the consumer. Fluoride is added solely as a supplement to improve dental health.
Some facts I posted in another thread about this topic;
Background info.
PFAS is a class of chemical substances with varying properties, but in general act as surfactants.
PFAS are considered carcinogenic and impact birth weight.
PFAS contain a carbon-fluorine bond, which is a very strong bond that does not naturally degrade.
Some PFAS will naturally decrease concentration over time, but only to be transformed into other compounds that will not (often PFOS).
Regulation.
The US EPA has taken the approach of regulating a select few PFAS, generally based on their known toxicity. PFOA and PFOS will essentially be limited to a concentration of zero.
The US EPA has been working on this for years. Mr. Biden did not snap his fingers and make a regulation. These things move much slower than that, and the industry generally feels that this process moved too quickly because there is limited understanding of how much PFAS exists in drinking water.
Health Canada has proposed a guideline which limits PFAS to 30 ng/L (ppt) as a total sum of all compounds that can be accurately measured. Currently their guidelines limit PFOA to 200 ng/L and PFOS to 600 ng/L. Health Canada does not regulate your water provider through, that is up to your provincial/territorial government, which may have different guidelines than this.
PFAS in the environment.
PFAS is ubiquitous in the environment due to its travel through the water cycle. It exists in Antarctic ice and on top of Mount Everest.
Usually the largest sources of PFAS in drinking water are firefighting training areas that used PFAS containing foams (airports and military bases), landfills, certain manufacturers (metal plating, paper, semiconductors), and municipal wastewater. There are many more sources than this though.
Landfills and municipal wastewater tend to be the highest mass loading of PFAS because of the ubiquity of PFAS in consumer products.
Treatment.
PFAS can be destroyed using electrochemical and thermal methods, but these are not feasible for drinking water treatment.
The current approach for drinking water treatment is adsorption to either granular activated carbon (GAC) or ion exchange resin.
Treating PFAS at the source is always the goal instead of treating it at a water treatment plant.
Feel free to ask questions, I will do my best to answer them!
PFAS is a class of chemical substances with varying properties, but in general act as surfactants.
PFAS are considered carcinogenic and impact birth weight.
PFAS contain a carbon-fluorine bond, which is a very strong bond that does not naturally degrade.
Some PFAS will naturally decrease concentration over time, but only to be transformed into other compounds that will not (often PFOS).
Regulation.
The US EPA has taken the approach of regulating a select few PFAS, generally based on their known toxicity. PFOA and PFOS will essentially be limited to a concentration of zero.
The US EPA has been working on this for years. Mr. Biden did not snap his fingers and make a regulation. These things move much slower than that, and the industry generally feels that this process moved too quickly because there is limited understanding of how much PFAS exists in drinking water.
Health Canada has proposed a guideline which limits PFAS to 30 ng/L (ppt) as a total sum of all compounds that can be accurately measured. Currently their guidelines limit PFOA to 200 ng/L and PFOS to 600 ng/L. Health Canada does not regulate your water provider through, that is up to your provincial/territorial government, which may have different guidelines than this.
PFAS in the environment.
PFAS is ubiquitous in the environment due to its travel through the water cycle. It exists in Antarctic ice and on top of Mount Everest.
Usually the largest sources of PFAS in drinking water are firefighting training areas that used PFAS containing foams (airports and military bases), landfills, certain manufacturers (metal plating, paper, semiconductors), and municipal wastewater. There are many more sources than this though.
Landfills and municipal wastewater tend to be the highest mass loading of PFAS because of the ubiquity of PFAS in consumer products.
Treatment.
PFAS can be destroyed using electrochemical and thermal methods, but these are not feasible for drinking water treatment.
The current approach for drinking water treatment is adsorption to either granular activated carbon (GAC) or ion exchange resin.
Treating PFAS at the source is always the goal instead of treating it at a water treatment plant.
Feel free to ask questions, I will do my best to answer them!