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They are in your drinking water, the food you eat, the clothing you wear and even in that piece of gum you are chewing. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are everywhere, and they can cause a range of adverse health issues – from obesity and cancer to low birth weight in children.

These so-called “forever chemicals” keep Lee Ferguson up at night. The professor of civil and environmental engineering, who has a secondary appointment in the Nicholas School of the Environment, has been at the forefront of PFAS research. He is an example of how Duke and university research is improving the lives of North Carolinians.

Ferguson has spent more than two decades gathering data on emerging pollutants in the environment. Among the perpetrators are and the chemicals it leaches into groundwater; the in landfills that lead to contamination with PFAS and eventually end up in water supplies; and tracing sources of PFAS in the Cape Fear River Basin, particularly the Haw River of North Carolina, the result of textile manufacturing discharges.

“We serve as a sort of watchdog, more or less, for industrial pollution in waters around the state and the country,” Ferguson said during an interview from Zürich. He is spending his sabbatical in Europe working with other researchers, studying everything from emerging pollutants to the creation of analytical instruments and new ways to conduct forensic source tracing of PFAS. In other words, where are these chemicals coming from?

A Hotbed of PFAS

Although PFAS can be found everywhere, North Carolina is particularly affected because of the diversity of sources in this state, noted Ferguson. From the Chemours chemical facility in Fayetteville to the application of potentially contaminated biosolids to farmlands that end up in our water supply, the Tarheel State is a hotbed of PFAS.

What also makes North Carolina unusual, said Ferguson, “is the collection of researchers who live and work here and who have the expertise and the willingness to band together and do collaborative research to understand these impacts. That is truly what makes our state unique in terms of our ability to address these problems.”

Funded by a $5 million grant, North Carolina created an ambitious in 2018 to monitor PFAS levels in the state’s drinking water. Led by Ferguson and colleagues from universities around the state, the network represents a wide effort to monitor the compounds’ presence in drinking water supplies in 405 municipalities across North Carolina.

“Research at universities is seen as an abstract thing that doesn’t impact people’s daily lives. But the fact is ... the things that we’re doing are designed specifically to improve the health and lives of the general public.”

Lee Ferguson

While much research has been conducted and findings presented, an article last year in pointed out that little has been done to enact legislation designed to protect our water supply from PFAS.

“I understand that frustration, and I think it’s born of a desire to see things happen quickly, and I completely relate to that,” said Ferguson. “But we also must balance that desire with the need to make important regulatory decisions based on sound science. In the case of PFAS, national drinking water standards for some of the most problematic chemicals have been recently enacted.”

Ferguson said he regularly receives inquiries from state lawmakers and their staffers asking questions intended to help them draft the needed legislation at the state level. “It is being done. It’s just not as fast as I think we would all like it to happen.”

Successful Efforts & Moving Forward

Despite the slow pace of state-level legislation, Ferguson has realized numerous successes. He and colleagues published a paper last year in showing that disposal of lithium-ion batteries in landfills was leading to contamination with some unknown and unanticipated PFAS into those landfill leachates, and then eventually into water supplies.  They have since expanded on that research and have discovered new compounds.

“We’re going to push that forward and continue to look at other potential routes of clean energy-related PFAS into the environment,” he said.

He’s also working with the Office of the State Fire Marshal and other state agencies in identifying, collecting and sampling PFAS in firefighting foam and to find safe ways to dispose of it.

His lab is analyzing the PFAS and reporting that data to the Office of the State Fire Marshal, the North Carolina Office of Environmental Quality, and the companies charged with its destruction to give them information about what’s in the foams.

“We’re also going to be making sure that when the destruction of this material takes place, that it doesn’t form additional problematic PFAS or cause releases during that process. We’re really kind of shepherding that process all the way from the beginning to the end and bringing our analytical capabilities to bear on it,” Ferguson said.

Funding Cut Impacts

While North Carolina lawmakers continue to support research on PFAS and water quality, Ferguson has concerns about federally funded projects, including the , where he serves as a principal investigator in the Analytical Chemistry Core. He and co-investigators, Duke environmental chemist and environmental engineer Heileen Hsu-Kim provide chemical analyses to all projects within the Superfund Research Center.

“Our laboratories are among many that do work on the research-level aspects of environmental contamination and the consequences to both human and ecosystem health,” Ferguson said.

The work focuses on solving some of the most challenging analytical problems that result from environment and human health exposures, including industrial pollution, wastewater discharge, or other types of discharges, mostly to our water and the environment.

The research is conducted using a high-resolution to identify and analyze PFAS and other emerging pollutants. This will help in understanding where these compounds are coming from and finding ways to treat or prevent them from getting into the water supply.  

“What we do is serve as the tip of the spear for identifying these problems when they occur, so that when we start to realize them, we can take action,” he said.

One of the challenges Ferguson and other scientists face is getting people to understand that the work researchers do in their labs impacts everyone’s life. To take away funding for these studies , he said, would prove to be devastating.

“Too often, research at universities is seen as an abstract thing that doesn’t impact people’s daily lives. But the fact is that many of us who do research in a laboratory, even with some of the most esoteric chemistry-based measurements that you can think of, the things that we’re doing are designed specifically to improve the health and lives of the general public.”