Air and Emissions

As evident in legislation passed by Congress in 2020, the U.S. is growing increasingly concerned with air emissions from facilities where PFAS are part of the manufacturing processes or from treatment facilities where PFAS impacted waste are being treated. The 2020 National Defense Authorization Act aimed to increase regulation around the incineration of AFFF waste, and 196 PFAS compounds were added to the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, Toxics Release Inventory requiring U.S. facilities across sectors to report on the release of these chemicals to water, land or air. In support of these legislative movements, the USEPA has published OTM (Other Test Method) 45 and 50 for the collection and analysis of PFAS from source air emissions.

With increased awareness regarding source air emissions there is growing concern regarding the short and long range transport of these emissions, contaminating ambient air with measurable impacts to surface water, soil, and eventually groundwater. However, there is a lack of EPA published methods for PFAS in source or ambient air which has made assessing these impacts unachievable until recently.

Eurofins has been a pioneer in this field, conducting the necessary method development to support existing consent orders, research studies and the government in their method development efforts over the past few years. These methods are built from EPA standard methods for semivolatile and volatile compounds in air but modified to support the complexities unique to PFAS chemicals. The method development process has illuminated much about the unique chemical characteristics of these compounds and how they behave under different conditions. Having a thorough understanding of these complexities and how to manage them is paramount to obtaining defensible and reliable results.

Eurofins has experience with testing PFAS emissions from the following types of facilities:

• Thermal oxidizer treating PFAS chemical manufacturing waste products
• Carbon Beds treating PFAS off-gas from chemical reactor beds
• Cement kiln operations processing PFAS wastewater
• Carbon regeneration plants that treat bulk spent carbon
• Sewage Sludge Incinerators (SSI) that are known to process PFAS contamination
• Municipal Waste Incinerator systems that burn end-of-use fluoropolymer wastes
• Thermal desorber/secondary combustion soil treatment processes