An interdisciplinary team of UMass Amherst researchers has earned a seed grant through the university’s Institute of Diversity Sciences to study per- and polyfluorinated substances (PFAS) at the tap and better understand if the burdens of PFAS are disproportionately distributed.
Tihitina Andarge, assistant professor of resource economics, Sean McBeath, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Mohammad (Kiron) Shakhawat, a civil and environmental engineering postdoctoral researcher, have been awarded $15,000 to employ a citizen science approach to collecting drinking water samples and testing them for “forever chemicals,” persistent substances that resist breaking down.
This research comes on the heels of the first-ever national limits on PFAS in drinking water set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
“The EPA is now saying any water coming under this water treatment plant needs to be below, 4 parts per trillion for PFOA and PFOS, and then 10 ppt for four other different PFAS species,” says McBeath. “What we want to understand is if water treatment is already adhering to these limits or whether it will be problematic when these rules need to be abided by.”
Their research also includes an analysis of where PFAS predominates. Led by Andarge, this part of the research will overlay their PFAS data with available demographic and socioeconomic information, to see how factors such as rurality, poverty, race, ethnicity and education levels correlate with drinking water safety.
“It’s been widely studied that the closer you are to facilities that use PFAS, then the more likely your water will be contaminated,” McBeath explains, adding that these chemicals have a broad reach. “A lot of studies have shown that nearly everyone on the planet has measurable amounts of PFAS in our blood, so PFAS is everywhere. It’s in our frying pans. It’s in our clothing. So even though we’re not close to a source of it, it’s around us all the time. That sounds scary, but it’s just true.”
While exposure is nearly universal, that doesn’t mean that its effects are evenly distributed. The study aims to see if there is a discernable pattern of which communities have the highest exposure. “I fully expect that disadvantaged communities will be subjected to higher concentrations of PFAS,” says McBeath. “It’s not any different than any other water hardship that we see.”
The third component of their research focuses on how PFAS move, particularly studying the influence of rain and whether PFAS is transported directly through rain.