Brownfield PFAS water treatment wins U.K. remediation award

REGENESIS, a technology innovation firm, and Mott MacDonald, a United Kingdom-based engineering consulting firm, received the Best Application of Remediation Technologies at the Brownfield Awards 2023 held in Manchester, England on November 1.

The award recognized the use of REGENESIS’s advanced colloidal activated carbon technology, PlumeStop, to treat groundwater contaminated with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in situ on a private airfield slated for redevelopment.

The use of the technology eliminated the PFAS risk to the environment without the costly pumping of groundwater. The approach also eliminated the continuous generation and handling of PFAS waste, and it reduced the generation of greenhouse gases.

“The PlumeStop treatment zone has been fully operational since October 2022,” said Julie Southall, associate environmental engineer at Mott MacDonald. “Since then, all target PFAS compounds, including PFOS and PFOA, have consistently remained below the detection limit. This ongoing success serves as a testament to the solution's effectiveness in mitigating PFAS risks to the environment and human health, and this has helped the landowner divest a portion of the site for redevelopment.”

Winning the award for Best Application of Remediation Technologies at the Brownfield Awards 2023 ceremony, the judges called it, “An excellent example of organizations working collaboratively to remediate a site where a chalk aquifer was impacted by PFAS.”

“With no water pumped to the surface, no ongoing energy use or maintenance cost and no creation of waste, this passive environmental solution has a lot to offer”, said Gareth Leonard, managing director of REGENESIS in Europe. “Although this award is specific to this first PFAS groundwater remediation in the U.K., the approach itself has been field-proven worldwide for over seven years and is backed up by multiple third-party scientific articles. Furthermore, an extensive independent sustainability comparison study undertaken for another PFAS-contaminated airport site, shows that compared to two types of ‘pump and treat’ methods, the PlumeStop treatment method is 65% cheaper and has a >95% smaller carbon footprint.”