In a blue shipping container on the banks of Jordan Lake, foam fractionation units are being deployed in a pilot program that, if successful, could hold the key to cheaply and rapidly eliminating so-called forever chemicals from drinking water sources across the country.
The technology from Invicta Water, a company founded in Burlington in 2023, combines the processes of removing PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) from water and then separately destroying the chemicals onsite.
Invicta Water and the Town of Cary embarked this week on a six-month-long pilot program that will see more than 18 million gallons of water drawn from the lake—one of the Triangle’s main drinking water sources—and treated to remove PFAS, with the chemicals then destroyed. Following that process, the water will be added back to the water supply to be fully treated.
“We’re really looking forward to seeing what the results are,” says Betsy Drake, the water utility engineering manager for the Town of Cary. “The fact that it destroys [PFAS] fast is a very exciting thing, and so we’re really excited to see what it can do.”
PFAS are synthetic chemicals that have been used widely in the manufacturing of household products, including cookware, food packaging, carpeting, and waterproof clothing, since the 1940s. They are characteristically nonsticky and resistant to high and low temperatures and degradation, which makes them difficult to destroy. Because of their widespread use, PFAS have been identified in water, air, and soil worldwide; an estimated 98 percent of Americans have PFAS in their bloodstreams.
But PFAS pose significant health risks and have been linked to a variety of ailments and conditions including cancer, thyroid disease, liver damage, immune suppression, infertility, and developmental delays. In 2016, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began regulating levels of three PFAS compounds, including GenX, a toxic chemical found in waterways across Eastern North Carolina that’s linked to the Fayetteville Works site run by DuPont (now Chemours).
In the United States, PFAS are present in 8,865 sites in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and four territories, according to newly released data from the EPA. The data confirm that 143 million people throughout the country use drinking water that has tested positive for PFAS; dozens of communities in North Carolina, including in Raleigh, Durham, Cary, and Chapel Hill, report PFAS contamination of drinking water above the EPA’s limit.
Last year, the EPA required public water systems to complete monitoring for PFAS by 2027 and comply with its stringent limits on PFAS allowed in drinking water by 2029, work that is already under way in the Triangle.
To rid drinking water sources of PFAS, municipal governments are using a variety of treatment technologies. Cary, which has been testing for and treating water for PFAS since 2018, uses powdered activated carbon at its raw water pump station, according to Drake.
“It has shown to be very effective at removing PFAS from the water,” Drake says. “Our testing shows that our treated water is consistently below the proposed EPA limits.”
The method is costly, though, and removing PFAS only solves half the problem; the chemicals still need to be disposed of, which is where Invicta Water comes in.
Steve Wilcenski, the company’s co-founder and CEO, says Invicta Water’s process of removing and destroying PFAS came about in reverse.
Wilcenski and his team began experimenting four years ago with a proprietary material composed of boron nitride. In a magnetic sort of process called adsorption, PFAS chemicals in water stick to the surface of the boron nitride crystals. Then, a UV light is shone onto the crystals, causing a catalytic reaction. The crystals function as a semiconductor and begin to emit electrons; those electrons break up the PFAS and charge the water in a way that also helps break the bonds, leaving behind no harmful byproducts.
But “destroying [PFAS] was only one piece,” Wilcenski says. “We had to figure out how to find it and remove it at the same time. What we like to think that we do is think about things a little bit differently. We’re a small group of people, we don’t have deep pockets. We try to do things ourselves. We wanted to find a better way to do it than the status quo, and we didn’t want to invent anything if we didn’t have to.”
So they looked to foam fractionation, technology that’s used in aquaculture, fish farms, and large aquariums. Foam fractionation uses water bubbles—air mixed with water—to bind to the broken-up PFAS chemical molecules and pull the contaminants directly out of the water.
“We figured out [a] way to put a few of these foam fractionators together in a very special manner … that we can find even the smallest molecules,” Wilcenski says. It’s a process that’s patent pending.
The final step was to build out the technology in a way that’s scalable. They came up with a box that pipes in untreated water, runs it through the system, separates clean water from PFAS-contaminated water (that’s now a smaller volume with a much higher concentration of PFAS), and breaks the PFAS down. A version of this box will treat 100,000 gallons of water each day at Jordan Lake through September.
“And all of this is done using very, very little energy, a very small footprint,” Wilcenski says. “And it’s very inexpensive compared to everything else that’s out there.”
Invicta Water’s technology has two cost advantages, Wilcenski explains: upfront costs and annual operation costs. While the most common PFAS removal technology that’s currently in use, granular activated carbon (GAC), typically costs $2-$4 per gallon of water, Invicta Water’s solution costs $1-$1.50 per gallon.
For Cary’s plant, which treats some 40 million gallons of water per day, that would mean a savings of between $40 million and $100 million per gallon.
Wilcenski says the annual operation cost for GAC is about 5 to 10 percent of the upfront cost, or for Cary, around $4 to $8 million per year in perpetuity. At the highest end, Invicta Water’s annual operation cost is $800,000 per year.
Over 10 years, the total cost of Invicta Water’s technology comes out to $48 million, while the total cost of using GAC, at the lowest end, is $120 million; additionally, PFAS are totally destroyed with Invicta’s method, while GAC requires hauling away waste for treatment offsite at additional cost.
Drake says Cary officials found out about Invicta Water’s technology at a virtual presentation that the City of Durham hosted.
“We were intrigued by the technology and also liked the fact that it’s homegrown, so to speak,” Drake says. “Some of their key leadership lives in Cary, so that was a cool thing for us.”
Along with Cary, Invicta Water is conducting pilot projects with municipalities, manufacturers, and other customers across the Southeast, including the City of Burlington, and Spartanburg and Laurens Counties in South Carolina.
A recent pilot using drinking water from Pittsboro showed a 100 percent reduction in three PFAS compounds after treatment. Another pilot with the City of Raleigh showed a 100 percent reduction of four PFAS compounds in reverse-osmosis-treated wastewater. And a pilot in Wake Forest using industrial wastewater showed a 99.7 percent reduction in the PFOA forever chemical compound and 100 percent reductions in two other PFAS compounds.
Wilcenski says Invicta Water is also working on a project with the Collaboratory at UNC-Chapel Hill to show it can use its process to remediate ponds with extremely high levels of PFAS contamination, something that will be helpful for landowners who want to redevelop contaminated property. And the company is partnering with NC State University and Duke University, comparing lab results to see “if [the universities’] techniques can help improve the accuracy, the precision, and the speed to get data.”
“That’s also a big problem with PFAS,” Wilcenski says, “just how long it takes to get the data.”
Soon, Invicta Water may be able operate at both the micro and macro scales, Wilcenski says, treating millions of gallons of municipal drinking water each day all the way down to having small systems operating in people’s homes. The prototype for a home system is expected to launch this summer and could be a game changer for people living in communities that can’t afford to treat their drinking water.
“We’re gonna have something that you can put in your house, probably … about the size of a water heater is what we envision,” Wilcenski says. Those, too, will operate cheaply and efficiently.
“All we’re really using is a little bit of electricity, air, water, and essentially gravity to do most of the work,” Wilcenski says. “There’s almost no cost to do the destruction. And because we’re completely destroying everything, there’s also no waste to dispose [of].”
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