PFAS

Mass balance

If you operate a facility that uses PFAS or has a legacy of their use, a multimedia mass balance can help account for air, waste, water, and product streams and can help you more fully understand the extent of your potential PFAS releases.

PFAS creates unique challenges to fully discern the impacts in and around a facility. With nearly two decades of experience with PFAS mass balance studies, Barr has developed the tools and approaches needed to provide clients with accurate results and a comprehensive understanding of their facilities.

Water and wastewater

Due to its durability, PFAS can be difficult to treat. Our PFAS water treatment design portfolio spans over two decades, with projects in municipal and industrial applications. Our water and wastewater engineers help clients evaluate PFAS impacts in groundwater, process wastewater, and other sources; work with them to navigate treatment and non-treatment options; and provide support for emergency-response PFAS water-treatment system design and implementation. Barr is a leader in evaluating emerging technologies and providing the best solution to address specific site conditions and needs.

Fate and transport

Subsurface fate-and-transport modeling is a useful tool when the need to understand and possibly predict future groundwater contaminant behavior can’t be met with field data collection alone. For the investigation of PFAS at several manufacturing facilities in the eastern United States, Barr has coupled models for air dispersion, surface flow, unsaturated zone flow and transport, and saturated zone flow and transport to develop and refine complex site conceptual models. We are working closely with environmental regulators in each state to help them understand how the models link together to produce an accurate site conceptual model illustrating the dispersion and transport of PFAS around each facility.

Stack testing

Barr's engineers, scientists, and technicians that perform stack testing have the knowledge and experience needed to complete your project efficiently. It is through this multi-discipline collaboration that not only has Barr performed PFAS stack tests for over 20 years, but our method developments have been incorporated into those promoted by the U.S. EPA and are utilized by the industry at large. Because our stack testers work closely with engineers who prepare air-quality permit applications, we view stack testing as part of your facility’s big picture. Before performing a test, we review the permits and regulations governing compliance. If testing is needed, Barr can provide a full range of services, including test-plan preparation, regulatory negotiation, sample collection, process-data monitoring and collection, lab analysis coordination, and data analysis and interpretation.

Assessment and remediation

A core specialty at Barr is evaluating site histories and conducting field investigations for potential environmental impacts through Phase I and Phase II environmental site assessments and other approaches. As more is learned about PFAS compounds in the environment, the evaluation of potential historical uses of these compounds has come to the forefront. Barr’s nearly two decades of experience working with PFAS compounds, familiarity with the PFAS manufacturing industry, and focus on the chemistry of these compounds has set us apart from firms who have just recently begun working on PFAS-impacted sites. Our environmental engineers and geologists have completed thousands of assessment and remediation projects for public- and private-sector clients. This work has given us extensive experience on complex projects involving a wide variety of groundwater, surface water, and soil contamination investigation and remediation issues.