MAINE MONITOR • October 2, 2022
When members of the regional watershed group Friends of Merrymeeting Ba) 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. Bob Bowcock, a national water consultant who is helping Maine communities address PFAS contamination, sees screening tests as a means of triage given “we’ve got an emergency on our hands.”