Fluorine Blind: How US Water Testing Misses the Point

University of Alabama researcher wins national award for showing standard PFAS tests miss up to 96% of fluorinated contamination in water

27 Mar 2026

A University of Alabama researcher has received a national award for demonstrating that conventional testing methods miss the vast majority of fluorinated contamination in water samples, a finding with significant consequences for remediation programs across the country.

Metrohm USA named Sarah Ortbal its 2026 Young Chemist Award winner this week, citing research that links PFAS monitoring, advanced fluorine analysis, and treatment pathways in ways that could alter how contaminated sites are assessed nationwide. The award carries a $15,000 prize.

The central finding concerns how testing is designed. Standard PFAS screening checks for a defined list of named compounds, leaving unlisted fluorinated organics undetected. Ortbal's work shows that adsorbable organic fluorine analysis, a non-target approach that measures total fluorinated organics rather than specific compounds, can identify up to 25 times more contamination than targeted methods alone. That gap suggests the true PFAS burden at many industrial and municipal sites is considerably larger than current assessments reflect.

Her research extended beyond the laboratory in several important ways. Ortbal documented how PFAS compounds recirculate inside wastewater treatment processes rather than being removed, identified contaminated chemical additives entering treatment streams, and incorporated trifluoroacetic acid, a short-chain fluorinated compound absent from standard testing panels, into her monitoring protocol. Across Alabama, she conducted upstream and downstream sampling near wastewater treatment plants, mapping contamination patterns across the state's surface water network.

The findings arrive at a fraught moment for federal regulators. With 176 million Americans confirmed to have PFAS in their drinking water, according to the latest EPA data, and regulators actively debating the scope of maximum contaminant limits, the reliability of the measurement tools underpinning compliance and cleanup decisions has become a front-line concern. Remediation programs built on undercounted baseline data risk being calibrated to only a fraction of the contamination actually present. Whether non-target analytical methods gain wider adoption in federal and state cleanup protocols may ultimately determine how accurately the country measures, and confronts, its PFAS problem.