Read the full article by Marina Schauffler (The Maine Monitor)
“When members of the regional watershed group Friends of Merrymeeting Bay (FOMB) learned about a relatively affordable PFAS water-testing kit made by the Illinois company Cyclopure, they envisioned using it to screen waters in the six rivers that feed the bay. To ensure credible results, the group’s chair, Ed Friedman, organized what he termed a ‘Consumer Reports-style comparison,’ sending split samples from a single water source to Cyclopure, and to three labs accredited by state and federal agencies.
FOMB found that the Cyclopure kit, which uses a corn-based disk designed to extract PFAS from water, delivered comparable results to two of the accredited labs in a similar time frame (a week or two) at substantial cost savings; each kit costs less than $80 rather than between $400 and $700. (The third accredited lab failed to detect many compounds the other labs had and took more than a month to deliver results.)
PFAS Free Trenton, a citizen’s group that recently persuaded the town’s select board to approve purchasing 100 test kits for residents, chose to test with accredited labs despite the added cost, said its spokesperson, Christina Heiniger, because those tests are the only ones recognized by the state.” …