Targeted Compounds
Long- and short-chain PFAS
Treatment system
ECT2’s GAC + SORBIX™ PURE
Treatment objective
93% PFAS removal
Outcome achieved
99.8% PFAS removal
We Believe The World Needs Better Ways To Treat PFAS
Opportunity
Airports around the world are finding that PFAS contamination caused by historical airport operations have contaminated nearby groundwater or surface water. One airport in Scandinavia decided that PFAS-contaminated groundwater needed to be remediated.
Challenge
The airport operator was looking for a solution that would be effective, sustainable, economically viable, and quick to implement. Through a competitive tendering process, the team considered several treatment technologies, including foam fractionation, granular activated carbon, and ion exchange. The team ultimately selected ECT2’s ion exchange solution SORBIX™ PURE.
The design basis called for a system that could manage a maximum flowrate of 17 m3/h and influent PFAS concentrations as high as 6,200 ng/l, including several hundred ng/l of short-chain compounds including PFBA and PFPeA.
Solution
The PFAS remediation project, which went live in September 2023, is one of Scandinavia’s biggest to date. After pre-treatment, the water flows into vessels containing SORBIX™ PURE resin, where processes of ion exchange and adsorption remove 99.8% of PFAS. The treated effluent exceeds the client’s expectations.
The SORBIX™ PURE ion exchange technology from ECT2 is one of the most effective on the market for removing PFAS compounds, including hard-to-treat short-chain molecules: its PFAS removal capacity is 13x more effective than other technologies such as granular activated carbon. Sites with high levels of contamination have much lower costs if they use ion exchange instead of the alternatives because the systems are smaller, require less maintenance, create less waste, and need just a fraction as much material to remove the same amount of PFAS. At the appropriate scale, SORBIX™ resins can be regenerated and the effluent concentrated through patented processes to further reduce costs, reduce liability, and improve treatment efficacy.
ECT2’s bespoke solution was delivered in six months and was operational in seven months. In its first two months of operation, the system has treated over 12 million litres of water.
