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About PFAS

PFAS can be found through air, dust, soil, and water. Exposure to it in any of those ways can lead to a danger in health. Examples being liver damage, high cholesterol, cancer, etc. We put our focus into the contanimation of PFAS in water and factory dumping that can be causing it

Data

UCMR3_all.zip (Unregulated Containment Monitoring Rule 2013-2016)
UCMR3 Website source

PFAS_Blood_Data.zip

WaterPro.csv

Graphs

Visuals were made to present what we were able to discover from the data. Research was done from there to learn and show what was found

Goals

We hope to be able to find any way to help prevent people from exposure of PFAS and educate from what we were able to gather

Using data from UCMR3

The data is taken from finished water systems. Using the data we were able to find PFAS within each state by only looking at those that met or exceed the minimum reporting level(MRL) for each PFAS chemical.
However as of 2020, the MRL for the PFAS chemicals have lowered drastically more. Example one chemical PFBS which is a chemical under PFAS went from a MRL of 0.09 ug/l to 0.003 ug/l
The data did not contain the values any lower then the MRL that was set from 2012 so it's highly likely that the total amount is far lower then what is shown here

This graph shows the total amount of PFAS that was recorded in each state of the United States. Several states appear to had no recorded incidents in the time range so they do not appear on the graph

Rise of recorded PFAS

In severaly states there was a large growth in recorded PFAS which resulted in a larger range to be covered in the graph. Out of all of them, Colorado had the highest amount

Through the years it can be seen that in 2014 several states had a surge of PFAS found in the water systems with Colorado being the biggest offender
From main locations that were found contaminated were all wells in Colorado. Research suggests that it was due to a base sprayed PFAS-laden foam that fire-fighters used at an airforce base that was seeped into the underground aquifers. There was discoveries of other states experiencing the same problem with airforce bases in their states in the same year
Controversy from rose from the concern causing regulations to be pushed for. This presumbly helped the decline of PFAS has there is not any PFAS recorded there for 2015 and later regulations were pushed in 2016

Source

Decline in PFAS

It can be seen that states that were previously more intense have gone down. Though one two states being New Jersey and Georgia have a higher count of records

Like with Colorado there was seen a PFAS-laden foam that was used at airforce bases that seeped into the water systems which was shown in the data
Furthermore in Georgia there was an operating plant by Georgia-Pacific that had parchment paper containing PFAS that was closed down in 2015

Data from PFAS_2013-2014 and PFAS_2015-2016

Both of these data checked different people and recorded the level of each of the types of PFAS in a person's blood system. No date was given in the records for the data so only the end year of both datasets when comparing them

Both datasets only PFNA was looked at since that was the only chemical that match what UCMR3 contained
Then only the people that were confirmed to be over the MRL was counted which was used for the bar graph
There was little change with the amount of people contaminated from 2014 to 2016 so it is likely that there has not been any improvement to those that were affected
However this can be due to the fact that once you are exposed to PFAS, it will always stay with you. It is possible to contain less of it in one's body but it will always be there which could explain the little change in the bar graph

Correlations between Chemicals PFOA/Vanadium/Chlorate
Correlation of Chemicals PFOA/Chlorate/Chromium-6
Correlation of Chemicals PFOA/Vanadium/Chromium-6

Using data from UCMR3

PFOA is a type of PFAS chemical and from our research was the only one with a possible correlation with non-PFAS chemicals. Graphs of those can be seen in the Graphs section under UCMR3. The data was first split between the each PFAS and all other chemicals by each month from 2013-2016. Only areas where PFAS chemicals were found was used to ensure that the data was not possibly skewed. Then through coefficient of determination we were able to find a correlation between PFOA, Cholrate, Chromium-6, and Vanadium. These were the only ones to recieve a coefficient of determination high enough to be considered

PFOA is used in products like water-repellent clothes, cardboard packaging, non-stick pans, cosemtics, and foams used to fight fires
From our observations, we believe that the chemicals mentioned before are indicators to PFOA. They could be used discover to PFOA in the water systems before it is too late