I recently sat down on Concentrating on Chromatography with Michelle Taylor, editor-in-chief of LabCompare, to talk about the outlet's two-part “Forever Chemicals” documentary series.
LabCompare built its reputation as an online buyer's guide for analytical instrumentation, but these documentaries are something different: long-form journalism that pulls together subject matter experts from academia, instrument manufacturers, and regulatory agencies to explain where PFAS testing actually stands today. Few other publishers in this space are investing in that kind of format, and the conversation gave me a lot to think about as a manufacturer sitting on the equipment side of the PFAS workflow.
Watch the conversation:
The seafood moment
Michelle opened by telling me the biggest surprise from the second documentary wasn't a data point. It was watching subject matter expert after subject matter expert admit, on camera, that they had personally stopped eating seafood. Some had quit a decade earlier. That kind of anecdote does more to communicate risk than any concentration table, and it's a reminder that the people closest to PFAS data are also the people most changed by it.
Capacity without sacrificing sensitivity
Laboratories are drowning in PFAS sample volume while regulators keep pushing detection limits into the parts-per-trillion range. Michelle described the tiered approach that's become standard practice: an inexpensive single-quadrupole instrument screens every sample first, and only the positives get escalated to a triple-quadrupole system for full quantitation. It's a sensible way to stretch lab capacity without loosening sensitivity, and it maps directly onto the same funnel logic labs use for EPA's total organic fluorine method, discussed below.
Why PTFE-free equipment matters
We also talked about background contamination — the risk that PTFE-lined tubing, containers, and lab consumables themselves introduce PFAS into a sample, generating false positives. Michelle called PFAS-free equipment manufacturers “unsung heroes” for analysts working in the trenches of PFAS analysis, and she expects that role to grow more critical as detection limits keep falling. This is directly relevant to Organomation's own history in this space: our N-EVAP nitrogen evaporation systems are already utilized in EPA drinking water methods 533 and 537.1 for PFAS analysis, and we built a dedicated PFAS-free option code so labs can specify Teflon-free construction on the product page rather than fielding the question every time a new sample comes through the door.
High-lipid matrices are their own animal
Fatty samples — think fish tissue — need an aggressive extraction to liberate the analytes, followed by a strict lipid cleanup. Skip that cleanup step and the fats will degrade LC columns and generate severe matrix interference. Michelle said enhanced matrix removal and similar carbon-based or silica sorbents are currently the industry standard for that cleanup, with more technical solutions likely on the horizon as labs push toward lower detection limits in high-lipid tissue.
Packaging regulation is a patchwork, and that's the point
We talked about PFAS migrating out of takeout containers and popcorn bags and into food — the subject of the documentary's second installment. Rhode Island is a useful case study: the state signed a law in 2022 banning food packaging with intentionally added PFAS, then pushed the effective date back twice before it finally took hold in January 2025. Rhode Island joined ten other states — including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, Vermont, and Washington — with similar phase-outs already in place. Michelle's read on where this goes next: the experts she's interviewed don't expect a single federal packaging standard until a critical mass of states adopts their own bans first, at which point it becomes cost-prohibitive for suppliers to maintain two different product lines. Food packaging, she argued, is the category most likely to tip that balance, precisely because eating out and taking food home is such an unavoidable part of daily life.
The US and EU are not playing the same game
This was one of the more useful parts of the conversation for anyone supporting international food exporters. The European Union regulates PFAS in food through Regulation (EU) 2023/915, which sets maximum levels for four specific compounds — PFOS, PFOA, PFNA, and PFHxS — individually and as a sum, in eggs, fish, crustaceans, meat, and offal. Those limits trace back to a 2020 EFSA risk opinion that set a group tolerable weekly intake of 4.4 nanograms per kilogram of body weight for the same four compounds. The US approach, by contrast, is broader and less compound-specific: it leans on monitoring and import alerts rather than a defined list of regulated analytes in food. Michelle pointed out that this forces US labs supporting international trade into a dual compliance model — screening a wider, evolving list of PFAS compounds for US purposes while running targeted, ultra-sensitive analysis for the EU's four named compounds. That's more instrument time, more method validation, and a more fragmented supply chain to navigate, all for the same shipment.
Total organic fluorine as a triage tool
I asked Michelle about EPA Method 1621, which screens for total organic fluorine rather than a specific list of PFAS compounds. The method uses combustion ion chromatography to estimate adsorbable organic fluorine, giving labs a way to close the mass balance gap between what targeted LC-MS/MS panels catch and what's actually present in a sample, including PFAS that current target lists don't cover. It's worth noting this is explicitly a screening method — EPA has acknowledged it's less precise than compound-specific methods like 537.1 or 1633, and it can't distinguish PFAS from other organofluorine compounds, including roughly 360 approved fluorinated pharmaceuticals. Used correctly, though, it functions as the first gate in the same tiered logic Michelle described earlier: run total organic fluorine first, and only escalate to targeted triple-quad analysis when there's a hit.
Bench chemists are becoming data scientists, PFAS or not
One of the more forward-looking parts of the discussion had nothing to do with PFAS specifically. Michelle argued that the ability to manage and interpret high-resolution mass spec data — often with help from AI and large language models — is becoming almost as important as running the instrument itself. Her framing was that this doesn't replace the specialist so much as democratize the interpretation, letting a less experienced analyst get an answer without waiting on someone who might be at a conference or on vacation. I'd add that this mirrors what we've seen elsewhere in scientific computing: pattern-recognition breakthroughs, like those behind protein folding models, have repeatedly found relationships in data that even highly trained specialists missed.
Detection is not destruction
We also touched on a part of the PFAS conversation that gets less airtime than testing: what happens after you find it. Michelle explained that current destruction methods target the carbon-fluorine bond, and while incineration-based approaches have shown promise for environmental matrices, they often don't fully defluorinate long-chain PFAS. Instead, they can convert them into shorter-chain PFAS that get emitted into the air — solving the water or soil problem while creating an air quality one. That's pushed some labs toward monitoring byproduct emissions in addition to the more familiar work of regulatory PFAS quantitation, a genuinely different analytical discipline from what most PFAS labs do today.
Where this connects to UCMR 6
Regulatory momentum here isn't slowing down. EPA proposed the sixth Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule on July 1, 2026, which would require public water systems to collect national occurrence data on 30 unregulated contaminants — including several ultrashort-chain organofluorine compounds — from 2028 through 2030. It's still a proposal, with public comment open through August 31, 2026, but it follows the same pattern Michelle described: EPA tackled drinking water first, and food and other matrices are following on a delay. Commercial labs that support UCMR sampling programs would be wise to start planning instrumentation and method capacity now rather than scrambling once the rule is finalized.
What's next for LabCompare
Michelle confirmed a third PFAS documentary is plausible, likely focused on PFAS in air, a topic she said came up repeatedly during filming of the food documentary and that she hadn't previously connected to her own daily exposure. LabCompare's next release, expected before the end of the year, moves away from PFAS entirely to look at sustainability across the food supply chain — think coffee, rice, and other global staples under pressure from climate change and shifting trade patterns.
If you work anywhere near PFAS testing, food safety, or environmental compliance, both LabCompare documentaries are worth your time, and I'd encourage you to check out the full conversation with Michelle on Concentrating on Chromatography for more of the detail we didn't have room for here.