What are VOCs?

Lowry water tech solution for VOCs

Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) are natural and human-made organic chemicals that can contaminate water supplies. Examples of VOCs include:

  • Naturally occurring methane

  • Vinyl chloride (VC) from the plastics industry

  • Cleaning solvents such as trichloroethylene (TCE) and tetrachloroethylene (PCE)

  • Gasoline components such as benzene, toluene, and xylenes

Why are VOCs harmful in drinking water?

Exposure to VOCs has the potential to cause a wide range of serious health problems, from anemia and a decrease in blood platelets to liver problems, cancer, and nerve damage. For these reasons, the U.S. EPA regulates individual VOCs in drinking water.

How we remove VOCs from municipal drinking water and private systems

Lowry Water Technologies has been removing VOCs from drinking water for nearly 40 years, having completed definitive research throughout the 1980s on removing gasoline contamination caused by leaking underground storage tanks (LUST). Methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE), a gasoline additive manufactured in the 1970s, was shown to be one of the most difficult to strip VOCs. Naphthalene is similarly difficult to strip, and these are the most difficult contaminants we attempt to airstrip efficiently.

In 2014, Lowry Engineering conducted a study for the U.S. EPA on the effectiveness of air-stripping 13 VOCs from drinking water, contributing to the EPA’s process of updating current regulation of VOCs in drinking water.

Many regulated VOCs are volatile enough to be removed practically by air stripping. The technology we use is our patented DeepBubble™ multi-stage diffused bubble air stripper system. The specific system design for any given application is determined by water flow rate, water temperature, particular contaminant(s), and their concentration(s), as well as some other water quality parameters.