Richard Calbi, director of Ridgewood Water, was astonished to discover the extent of PFAS contamination in New Jersey drinking water when the state adopted pollution standards for the industrial chemicals in 2020. “The first thing we did was determine if we were affected and found them in every one of our 52 groundwater wells. We couldn’t find water to buy that didn’t have PFAS in it. We had to reimagine and rebuild our entire system to accommodate new filters,” Calbi said.
Charmi Chande, a former postdoctoral researcher in chemical engineering at NJIT, heard similarly harrowing accounts from other system operators she interviewed as part of a National Science Foundation-funded I-Corps team. “As technology developers, we asked them about pain points in the remediation process,” she recounted. “What nearly everyone said in more than 100 interviews was that they needed solutions now – kits that would allow them to expeditiously test the water at their own facilities rather than sending it out to labs and waiting for results to come back.”
Shortly after, Chande and three NJIT researchers co-founded PFASolve, a company offering end-to-end remediation technologies – detection, capture and destruction – that are relatively inexpensive and sustainable. They are conducting pilot tests at regional facilities, including Ridgewood Water, as a step toward commercialization. Calbi is one of their advisors. To read the full story.