The challenge
Forever chemicals are everywhere. Finding them shouldn't take weeks.
PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — resist breaking down, spread through water, and build up in people and wildlife. The hard part isn't just cleaning them up; it's finding them fast enough to act. That's the challenge Wave Lumina exists to solve.
- NSF SBIR Phase I
- Activate Fellow '25
- U.S. Patent 12,644,842
- Great Lakes Innovation Award
- Launching 2027
How contamination spreads
PFAS don't stay where they're spilled.
Forever chemicals move. From the moment they're released, they travel through soil, water, and living things — which is what makes finding them early, on-site, so important.
Released at the source
Industrial sites, firefighting foam (AFFF), and landfills release PFAS into soil and surface water.
Into soil & groundwater
The carbon–fluorine bond resists breakdown, so PFAS leach through soil and spread through aquifers.
Through to drinking water
Plumes migrate into wells and municipal supplies — often miles from where the contamination began.
Into people & wildlife
PFAS accumulate in blood and tissue and persist for years, which is why they're called forever chemicals.
PFAS testing hasn't kept pace with the problem.
Forever chemicals are everywhere, but the tools to find them still depend on shipping samples to a lab and waiting. For the consultants and site owners who have to keep remediation moving, that gap is where schedules slip and costs climb.
The scale of it
We regulate a handful. There are thousands.
Federal drinking-water limits cover a small set of PFAS. But that's the tip of the iceberg — the vast majority of forever chemicals in use have never been monitored, and the enforced limits are measured in parts per trillion.
≈ 6 PFAS federally regulated
PFOA, PFOS, PFHxS, PFNA, GenX, PFBS — the compounds with enforceable U.S. drinking-water limits.
12,000+ PFAS in commerce
The thousands of related forever chemicals that standard targeted testing was never designed to see.
The EPA's enforceable limit for PFOA and PFOS in drinking water — parts per trillion.
That's about four drops of water spread across twenty Olympic-size swimming pools. Detecting it on-site is the hard part.
We're building the tool that closes the gap.
Wave Lumina is developing field-ready PFAS screening so contamination can be found in minutes, on-site — not weeks later in a lab report. Join the pilot program or send in a water sample to be part of it.