WATER INDUSTRY FEATURES, INSIGHTS, AND ANALYSIS
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Microplastics: Small Particles, Bigger Questions
New research suggests that microplastics can generate reactive chemicals in water, offering a possible explanation for their effects on living things.
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Tackling Lake Erie's Algal Blooms Requires Targeted Conservation Strategies Algal blooms in Lake Erie remind us how closely food production and clean water are connected. Many of these nutrients come from nearby farms, and the challenge is keeping them out of waterways.
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After The Fire: What The 2026 Wildfires And El Niño Could Mean For U.S. Lakes And Reservoirs In 2027 In July, smoke from Canadian wildfires spread across the upper Midwest and Northeast. Now a strengthening El Niño is set to influence the coming winter. Both events matter to lake and reservoir managers because their effects on water quality will continue to emerge long after the skies clear or the El Niño passes.
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Minneapolis Flexes Its Mussels For Source Water Monitoring Solution
Protecting municipal drinking water requires rapid visibility into changing surface source conditions. Discover how combining biological indicators with continuous inline spectrometry delivers real-time contamination alerts, preventing costly treatment plant shutdowns and safeguarding consumer health.
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DEXSORB® Treatment At Groundwater Pump Station
Discover how upgrading existing filter infrastructure with advanced adsorbent media provided over 600 days of continuous PFAS removal, treating millions of gallons of contaminated groundwater to achieve strict drinking water compliance.
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DEXSORB® Treatment Of Surface Water For Gravity System
Discover how a dual-vessel lead-lag media system achieved continuous non-detect levels for target legacy contaminants, treating over 250,000 gallons of surface water to support regulatory compliance and municipal drinking water goals.
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Pretreatment Systems Enable Complete And More Economical PFAS Solutions For operators looking to optimize their PFAS removal systems, controlling the presence of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) offers an approach to minimizing operational costs due to granular activated carbon (GAC) reactivation and ion exchange media change-out.
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What Utilities Don't Know About GAC Reuse For PFAS For utilities building PFAS treatment systems, thermal reactivation of spent granular activated carbon (GAC) may sound like the obvious answer. However, service provider availability and location, specific media acceptance criteria including quantity thresholds, restrictions on GAC type and condition, and regulatory uncertainty can all determine whether reuse is a viable option.
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The Cost Of Waiting: Utilities Face A Narrowing PFAS Compliance Window For years, the water industry's PFAS conversation centered on monitoring, testing, and regulatory anticipation. Today, that phase is largely over.
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PFAS Funding Is Flowing — But Does The Water Sector Have Enough People To Deliver It? For several years, the PFAS conversation has centered on treatment options, testing, and funding. Those factors still matter, but they are no longer the primary constraint. Most utilities already understand the treatment routes available to them; the real challenge now is moving from technical possibility to operational performance, and that depends entirely on people.
VIEWS ON THE LATEST REGS
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For years, the water industry's PFAS conversation centered on monitoring, testing, and regulatory anticipation. Today, that phase is largely over.
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The U.S. EPA is testing a new procedural strategy to remove four PFAS drinking‑water limits from ongoing litigation, asking the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to invalidate those limits on the grounds that the EPA itself committed a procedural misstep when issuing the 2024 PFAS rule.
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Despite renewed public concern over fluoride and cognition, the National Toxicology Program’s findings focus on high‑fluoride groundwater conditions — not the controlled levels used in U.S. drinking water systems. Understanding that distinction is critical for utilities navigating policy questions and community expectations.
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In this Q&A, Dr. Elke Süss of Metrohm addresses the urgent need for haloacetic acid testing in response to “one of the most significant updates to EU drinking water monitoring in recent years.”
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With the U.S. EPA's PFAS rules now in place, utilities are finding themselves with a growing number of questions regarding how to treat these chemicals, the potential costs, and much more. For answers, Water Online's chief editor, Kevin Westerling, hosted an Ask Me Anything session featuring Ken Sansone, Senior Partner at SL Environmental Law Group; Kyle Thompson, National PFAS Lead at Carollo Engineers; and Lauren Weinrich, Principal Scientist at American Water.
MORE WATER INDUSTRY FEATURES
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Learn about a novel solution dramatically improving the purification and yield of promising nanoscale vesicles for medical applications.
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The City of Hot Springs, Arkansas knows the challenges of dealing with aging infrastructure well. The city’s 143-year-old system covers 923 miles of water mains in rocky terrain, making it difficult to detect leaks. That is why the utility’s water department decided to act.
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An optimized in vitro transcription (IVT) platform enables scalable, high-yield, and cost-efficient mRNA therapeutic production by leveraging data-driven process optimization and enzyme innovation to overcome key manufacturing challenges.
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How one utility turned a backlog they didn't create into a program they're proud of.
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Evaluating the use of activated carbon and other media for water treatment is a crucial step to ensure project goals are achieved.
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Precision medicine is opening new possibilities for IMIDs by moving beyond symptom‑based care. Find out how emerging multi‑omics tools are reshaping how these complex diseases are understood.
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Learn why piloting PFAS treatment is essential to reduce risk, optimize costs, and ensure compliance—plus the seven key steps to design a pilot that delivers reliable, real-world results.
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In this article, Transcend will highlight the importance of EPA PFAS drinking water standards as well as how they ensure safe and clean water systems. We also provide the opportunity to streamline wastewater design for utilities, engineering consultants, and equipment suppliers.
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Equipment records, not software configuration, most often delay maintenance system go-lives in regulated manufacturing. A structured 90-day approach to data readiness changes what teams should prioritize and when.
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As utilities prepare for the pending 4-ppt PFAS drinking water MCL, many are discovering that legacy lead/lag designs — workhorses for decades when treating contaminants in the ppm and ppb range — simply are not optimized for the parts per trillion-level (ppt) precision PFAS demands.
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Advanced X-ray inspection, metal detection, and checkweighing technologies ensure fill accuracy, eliminate contaminants, and protect nutraceutical brands.
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The Toledo water crisis exposed treatment gaps, highlighting harmful algal blooms as a core design challenge requiring flexible, multi-barrier systems and scenario-based planning.
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Explore how manufacturers can turn sustainability challenges into strategic advantages through smarter energy use, regulatory insight, and emerging innovations.
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Inaccurate residual readings force water treatment facilities to overdose expensive chemicals or risk regulatory non-compliance. Maintaining measurement accuracy across fluctuating water conditions eliminates costly safety margins and lowers daily chemical expenses.
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With the right help, coping with workforce upheaval, the digital transition, and asset management can be an opportunity.
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As regulatory standards for PFAS become more stringent, specialized ion exchange resins provide a more efficient, high-capacity alternative to traditional carbon media, ultimately lowering long-term operational costs and improving overall system throughput and performance.
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Ultrafiltration offers a precise way to concentrate and purify proteins while removing smaller molecules. Learn how technique choice and membrane selection influence recovery, purity, and consistency.
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Undetected interferences in water analysis lead to reporting errors and costly compliance failures. Learn how to identify sample matrix disruptions using spike-and-recovery testing and apply practical lab techniques to ensure accurate, compliant data.