Scientists are putting more focus on eliminating PFAS, which are toxic compounds known as forever chemicals, from our environment.

The man-made chemicals are found in just about everything, including our tap water, and they're linked to serious health diseases like cancer.

At NJIT, researchers from around the region recently got together, working on new methods to remove PFAS and ultimately reduce exposure to them altogether.

Ted Goldberg reports.

It is estimated that nearly half of all the U.S. tap water contains forever chemicals and microplastics.

Scary, right?

More studies are showing increased risks of certain cancers and fertility issues from exposure to forever chemicals, also known as PFAS, and microplastics.

NJIT hosted professionals in the world of water, academics, and public officials for a conference on how we should deal with these dangers.

There is a dire need of coming together from the innovators and the researchers to the community leaders, to the legislature people, to find out what are, or what should be the industry standard.

So given these health effects, the department is committed to reducing exposure.

Forever chemicals have been found in everything from tap water and clothing to firefighting foam used on military bases.

Katie Angarone is the chief strategy officer for the DEP and explained why their focus is mostly on getting forever chemicals out of water.

We prioritize drinking water because water that contains PFAS has the potential to contribute to human exposure more than common sources such as food, food packaging, consumer products, house dust, those sorts of things, even indoor and outdoor air.

We're not talking about some abstract environmental issue.

We're talking about families in my own district who worry about what's coming out of the tap.

This is not a rural problem.

It's not a suburban problem.

It's not an urban problem or an agricultural problem.

It's a problem across every sector.

New Jersey first found PFAS in its water supply in 2006.

In 2018, the Garden State became the first state to create PFAS standards for drinking water.

Why is it difficult and challenging to capture all PFAS?

First, they occur in the environment at very, very low concentrations, parts per trillion, parts per billion.

So obviously you can't destroy PFAS directly in water samples.

This is not energy efficient.

In New Jersey, PFAS in water can't exceed 13 or 14 parts per trillion.

Federal requirements are a little more stringent, and Veolia North America spent tens of millions of dollars to upgrade a treatment plant in Delaware to meet that new standard.

Not only is the PFAS treatment system intensive from a capital standpoint, you have to think about operating it over the long term, which is a costly endeavor as well.

So we're always looking at how do we operate in a way that optimizes those costs.

It's really all about how do you concentrate it up into as small a package as possible so that that becomes an economical solution.

Clean water can come with a hefty price tag.

Veolia has requested a more than 40 percent rate hike for its customers in Delaware.

They also supply more than a million people in New Jersey, where leaders say they're doing what they can to monitor forever chemicals in the water supply.

So far, we've set groundwater standards.

We've listed certain PFAS as hazardous substances, which is really important because it gives our private well owners access to spill fund.

Researchers at Princeton are looking at a novel approach, bacteria that can destroy PFAS.

Instead of looking at the traditional let's filter, let's block, this particular methodology looks at how do we actually break down these materials.

This microbial electrolytic cell is something that's in the process of translating, and in our preliminary results, we're showing significant increase in the breakdown of these harmful chemicals.

Those microbes grow slowly, so researchers will need time to scale things up and make it viable.

In the meantime, leaders will grapple with an ever-present problem and complex, expensive solutions.

At NJIT, I'm Ted Goldberg, NJ Spotlight News.

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