SAFF has now been deployed across 12 installations in North America with a 99.9% removal rate for PFAS
Allonnia, the bio-ingenuity company dedicated to extracting value where others see waste, today announces its momentum since bringing EPOC Enviro’s SAFF® (Surface Active Foam Fractionation) solution to North America in April 2022. The first-of-its-kind technology uses the power of nature – in the form of rising air bubbles – to ‘lift’ per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) out of contaminated water and create a concentrate that can then be destroyed. Across twelve SAFF installations in the United States, including federal and municipal locations, SAFF can now treat more than 160 million gallons of contaminated water per year.
Public awareness of the environmental and health concerns of PFAS has risen dramatically in recent years, driven by the ongoing litigation in multiple states and federal reports that illustrate the presence of PFAS in at least 45% of all U.S. tap water. Additionally, recently issued and pending regulations from the EPA have placed the onus on manufacturers, industry, superfund sites, and municipalities to limit and control the amount of PFAS that gets released into the environment. For many of them, SAFF provides an affordable, scalable solution for separating PFAS from contaminated water without creating any new hazardous medium in the process.
“At Allonnia, we are harnessing the power of SAFF to tackle PFAS contamination in water with unmatched sustainability, eliminating the creation of additional waste and challenges associated with traditional media,” said Nicole Richards, CEO, Allonnia. “We are proud to have been the first in North America to bring this eco-friendly water remediation technology to market with a system that has been optimized over the past decade.”
SAFF leverages PFAS’ natural hydrophobic characteristics to encapsulate PFAS molecules within air bubbles and produce a ‘foam’ that can be destroyed with various other PFAS destruction technologies. SAFF is over 99% effective at removing PFAS molecules from contaminated water and can produce a concentrate that is more than 3.5 million times more concentrated than the default contamination. Allonnia has also developed a suite of PFAS booster products proven to further enhance SAFF’s capabilities in removing short-chain PFAS. This technology seamlessly pairs with SAFF’s onboard dosing system and is ready to use upon deployment, with no additional hardware required. Globally, the SAFF platform has processed over 215 million gallons of PFAS-contaminated water, with 60% of that occurring in North America through Allonnia’s work.
Allonnia’s SAFF installations range from municipal landfills to decommissioned military installations. Late last year, Allonnia signed a two-year contract with the Department of Defense’s Environmental Security Technology Certification Program to conduct water source remediation work at former Naval Air Station Joint Base Willow Grove and nearby Biddle Air National Guard Base in Horsham, Pennsylvania. The project deployed SAFF to PFAS-impacted groundwater and created small volumes of PFAS concentrate that could then be used for testing with various other destruction technologies. PFAS is so heavily present in such facilities due to the high use of aqueous film-forming foam, and the chemical has shown a tendency to seep into soil and groundwater and pose significant health and environmental risks.