How water providers in Delaware, Pa. and N.J. are tackling ‘forever chemicals’

At the end of a sparsely traveled road in northern Delaware, one drinking water provider is tens of millions of dollars and years ahead of nationwide efforts to address toxic “forever chemicals” in the water supply.

The high-tech drinking water treatment plant at Veolia’s Stanton, Delaware, location is so new that none of the 800,000 pounds of granular activated carbon has yet to be replaced. Granular activated carbon has become a go-to way to remove toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, better known as PFAS, and other contaminants from drinking water sources.

But when that carbon is overloaded with contaminants that it pulls from drinking water sources, the hope is the carbon can be “regenerated” for reuse in the same plant instead of simply being incinerated or dumped in a landfill. Recharging and reusing spent carbon within the same system is a potentially novel way of dealing with the byproduct created by removing toxic PFAS from drinking water, a contamination issue that has become a worldwide public health challenge. 

“We’re always analyzing the best available technologies and seeing what we can use for that specific compound,” said Gayla Fecher, engineering manager for Veolia’s Delaware operations. She said time will tell how much maintenance the system needs, and how well reused carbon media will work to remove contamination like that posed by PFAS.

Veolia’s new plant, Fecher said during a recent tour, also was designed to adapt to future technological or scientific advances — whether that means retrofitting certain equipment or treating for a completely different type of contamination. For now the carbon’s main enemy to capture are elusive and ubiquitous PFAS compounds.

Exposure to PFAS has been associated with a wide range of health effects, including kidney and testicular cancer, impacts to liver function, thyroid interference, decreased birth weight, and more. They’re called “forever chemicals” because they bioaccumulate in the body and they don’t break down naturally in the environment. 

Across the Delaware River watershed and beyond, private companies and public utilities have been racing to meet a 2029 deadline to meet federal “maximum contaminant levels” (MCLs) for PFAS in drinking water, to protect public health from those impacts. Because PFAS have been used so widely for so long, previous studies have found the manmade compounds in the blood of upwards of 99 percent of Americans, including newborns.

In April 2024, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the first time set specific MCLs for a handful of PFAS compounds, which would require drinking water providers to regularly test for PFAS and remove any contamination above that limit. But just over a year later, the Trump administration announced plans to rescind a portion of that regulation and extend the compliance deadline to 2031. The standards for PFOS and PFOA, two highly toxic compounds that were phased out of production over a decade ago, would remain in place. Limits on three other PFAS compounds and a mixture will be reconsidered, although that updated rulemaking has not yet been announced as of September.

As for the 14,000-plus other specific PFAS compounds that exist, there are no established nationwide limits for safe drinking water standards.

“There is a proliferation of ever-more confusing structural types of PFASs,” University of Pittsburgh associate professor Carla Ng said during a recent SciLine webinar, pointing to the challenges regulators face in addressing emerging contaminants. “Part of it is because they find new uses, and part of it is because one thing gets banned, something else comes along.”

It is possible, though, that requiring treatment for even just two types of PFAS could inadvertently lead to the removal of some other known or emerging contaminants as well, since the activated carbon doesn’t care about federal regulations when it catches contaminants in its pores. However, experts note the shorter-chain unregulated PFAS that have replaced the “legacy” PFAS aren’t captured quite as well by the activated carbon technologies being widely implemented.

“There’s always this huge delay from the science to the implementation,” Ng said. “Cleaning up what has already happened is difficult enough, but the fact that we’re not stopping the new parts means we’re going to have to deal with that in the future.”

A First State first

On a soggy summer day, three members of Congress — Sarah McBride of Delaware, along with Chrissy Houlahan and Mary Gay Scanlon, both of Pennsylvania — visited Veolia’s new, $35 million water treatment plant in northern Delaware, donning crisp, neon safety vests and helmets as they walked through aisles of towering white tanks filled with over 400 tons of activated carbon.

As fans buzzed, the federal lawmakers huddled closely around Veolia’s head local engineer as she explained how the system works.

Fecher showed where water comes into the 17,500-square food warehouse, moving through a series of pipes connected to 22-foot-tall tanks filled with porous activated carbon. As the water percolates through the tanks, PFAS can be adsorbed onto the carbon’s surface. The water in those tanks can be screened for PFAS at different depths to calculate how long it might take to get the contamination levels as low as possible. Current standards of 4 parts per trillion — equivalent to about one grain of sand in an Olympic swimming pool — are nearly as low as detection levels can reach.

If you think of the PFAS contamination in the water being treated here as a “grain of sand,” Fecher explained, each grain of sand must filter through about 80,000 pounds of activated carbon. That’s a lot of porous material to pass through, and the idea is that enough contamination will be caught that PFAS levels are low enough to be “nondetectable” and therefore safe for human consumption.

Veolia’s facility came online in March 2025 and serves about 120,000 residents and businesses, and is capable of treating up to 30 million gallons of water per day. It took about three years to construct, company officials said. By the time state and federal regulators were finalizing PFAS standards, the team at Veolia was already working on a conceptual design of the plant.

Back in her office and out of the heat, Fecher drew a diagram showing how the use of two-tank systems at the Veolia plant will elongate the life of the carbon that’s absorbing those forever chemicals. The first tank will absorb more pollution than the second, elongating the second tank’s lifespan, she explained. Still, PFAS-laden carbon will eventually need to be replaced.

But the system was also designed to adapt to future needs, whether that means different types of PFAS — like emerging short-chain or ether compounds that may not be captured as easily by activated carbon — or novel types of treatment media, or potentially addressing another unknown type of contamination.

“We have designed vessels that would be able to transition to these new media types, to meet new regulations,” Fecher said. “And we also installed a new half-a-million-dollar permanent pilot testing asset that we intend to use from now into perpetuity.”

Fecher noted Veolia was very deliberate about the cost of the system, too. It was able to get the carbon media costs down to about half of what it originally expected.

A watershed-wide challenge

Veolia’s new plant is the latest of several PFAS treatment facilities in Delaware. At least 10 utilities across the state are already treating for PFAS. In New Jersey, where state regulations already require drinking water providers to treat for PFAS, officials said in August that the state has issued 116 permits to 84 water systems to specifically address PFAS under state regulations.

“Other treatment facilities may have been constructed previously to address other contaminants that also address PFAS, but that number is not readily available,” New Jersey regulators said. “As an alternative, some public water systems may have taken certain sources out of service or connect to other public water systems, in lieu of installing treatment, which would also reduce exposure.”

Regulators also said that PFAS “is prolific across the state,” and that public water problems often occur at small- and medium-sized systems that rely on groundwater for drinking water.

Officials with the Delaware Office of Drinking Water said the 10 public water systems in the First State that now treat for PFAS use either granulated activated carbon — the technology of choice at Veolia’s Stanton plant — or ion exchange, which relies on charged ions to capture contaminated material much like a magnet.

While Delaware may now be able to tout one of the largest treatment plants of its kind in the state thanks to private investment, it was nearby New Jersey that was the first in the nation to institute drinking water standards for PFAS. State regulators there also recently announced a $2 billion settlement with DuPont and other chemical companies for its role in PFAS contamination in the state.

Because it was the first in the state to both investigate and regulate the problem, New Jersey helped build momentum to address PFAS and also contributed to the growing body of scientific evidence needed to support drinking water standards in other jurisdictions, said Melanie Benesh, vice president of government affairs at the nonprofit Environmental Working Group.

“State action is really important,” she said. “States are often able to move more quickly than the federal government. When the EPA finalized its PFAS rule last year, it was the most significant new drinking water standard in a generation.” In fact, it was the first time the EPA used new authority under the Clean Water Act to update federal rules, she added.

“I think New Jersey is an example of regulation working,” she said. The state now keeps a database of utilities with PFAS violations. The database also tracks the year individual water providers came back into compliance, indicating that dozens of systems are already removing the contaminants due to the state’s regulations on PFAS contamination.

Large, publicly regulated utilities like the Philadelphia Water Department, which relies on three treatment facilities to provide safe drinking water to 1.6 million people, still have their own hurdles to face. Despite the state being ahead of the curve when it came to developing regulations for PFAS, the city is still piloting approaches — instituting an actual treatment retrofit is years away from the making.

It will also cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, said Matthew Fritch, the city’s watershed protection program manager.

“We’re pleased to have two extra years because for such a large utility, it’s harder to do that kind of thing. Smaller facilities can do that much faster,” he said of the proposed changes to the federal PFAS rules. He said that, based on what it’s seen from its first pilot study, Philadelphia will likely retrofit its two drinking water plants with granulated carbon technology in the future. But it’s still waiting on the first report from the first pilot study — after that, the upgrade can begin to be designed, financed and planned.

Luckily, though, the surface waters Philadelphia customers rely on from the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers contain low levels of PFAS, levels below the state standard. It’s the more stringent federal standard that two facilities will need to treat for. The third, which is the only one that pulls from the Delaware, doesn’t need additional PFAS limits because the chemicals are not found at detectable levels.

“We’re continuing to look for where PFAS is entering our system,” he said, noting that monitoring is ongoing throughout rivers, streams and other point sources. “The PFAS does come from somewhere.”

It’s not just a problem for publicly owned utilities, either.

In Pennsylvania, a recent study found that about 18 percent of private wells in the state are contaminated with PFAS. Unlike public utilities, private wells are not subject to regulatory oversight; officials in New Jersey and Delaware are also working with homeowners to address PFAS contamination in private wells. 

According to EWG’s interactive PFAS contamination map, there are dozens of sites and utilities in the Delaware River watershed that report varying levels of PFAS contamination, from heavily contaminated military sites like Delaware’s New Castle Air National Guard Base not far from Veolia’s plant, and the former naval base at Willow Grove, Pa., to drinking water systems serving rural residents in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and beyond.

Researchers have estimated that it could cost between $24 billion and $55 billion to meet the 2024 proposed drinking water standards across the country. That’s just for upgrading the publicly regulated utilities.

In New Jersey alone, regulators have estimated it will cost the state over $1 billion to implement the new pending federal PFAS standards. Just monitoring the state’s roughly 1,200 water systems for PFAS is expected to cost $2.1 million annually.

“Importantly, this estimate does not include the sustained operational and maintenance costs that will be necessary for affected systems to maintain treatment,” regulators added.

The EPA has estimated costs at about $1.5 billion annually for monitoring, communication and treatment technologies, but also notes that benefits will be equally offset by preventing an estimated 9,600 deaths and 30,000 serious illnesses linked to PFAS contamination, including cancers, heart attacks and strokes.

Uncertainty in the regs

To offset uncertainty at the federal level, multiple states have adopted their own PFAS regulations. In Delaware, these state-level MCLs are the same as what was proposed at the federal level. But a new law signed by Delaware’s governor also aims to increase transparency into the process by requiring reporting of impacted water systems in the next two years.

“It’s a first get at trying to address the issue with all the uncertainty at the federal level,” said Delaware State Sen. Darius Brown, the Delaware Democrat who sponsored the legislation. 

He said the bill was part of an effort to answer questions impacted residents continue to have after learning that PFAS contamination from the nearby air base had contaminated their water supply. An exposure assessment by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry found that PFAS levels in New Castle residents’ blood was nearly 10 times the national level, likely from drinking contaminated water. More than half of the participants had at least seven different PFAS compounds in their blood.

Another law previously passed in Delaware also helps regulate PFAS by recognizing several compounds as hazardous substances, allowing the state to tackle clean-up responses when contamination is found. 

Nearby, New Jersey and Pennsylvania have long had their own state-level PFAS standards to rely on in the absence of federal regulations. However, those state limits allow for higher levels of PFAS contamination than the EPA’s 2024 limits. Even the EPA’s original health advisory limits of 70 parts per trillion were significantly reduced by the time the rule was actually made – to just 4 parts per trillion for PFOS or PFOA.

EWG’s Benesh said leadership at the state level is going to be key in addressing PFAS when the current administration seems to be rolling back previous rules. That can be done in part, she said, by incorporating PFAS oversight in ongoing state-level regulation of facilities that might be releasing chemicals.

As for funding the clean-up, there are government-based funding sources through revolving drinking water funds as well as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021, not to mention legal remedies sought against polluters. However, some federally funded programs like state revolving funds are facing proposed cuts from the current administration. 

New Jersey’s head environmental regulator recently told Inside Climate News that since the state first conducted water sampling nearly 20 years ago, it has found that “… New Jersey is, in many ways, ground zero for some of the worst impacts of PFAS” due to DuPont’s manufacturing history there. He, and many others, wants to see more effort to capture any contamination that’s still out there before it enters water systems.

As municipalities across the country race to add the technologies and find the funding needed to remove PFAS from drinking water sources, some experts suggest that a different regulatory approach altogether may be needed to address the growing number of types of PFAS, particularly the short-chain compounds that replaced legacy ones like PFOA and PFOS.

“I would say we’re making some progress that’s important in having regulations, but the chemical-specific regulation is really difficult to be effective because it’s one-by-one and something else is going to be manufactured,” explained Ng, the engineering associate professor from Pitt. “There are some state-based regulations that are more about ‘don’t put them into consumer food items’ or ‘don’t put them into makeup’ is much more health protective and much more effective than something that’s looking at a specific chemical when we have tens of thousands of these out there now.”