Tampa Will Be Home to World’s Largest SIX Facility
Tampa leads the way! City officials have announced that Tampa will be the first city in America using new technology to deal with the polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAs) in our water. Once complete, the “SIX” setup at the David L. Tippin Water Treatment Facility will be the first in America and the largest in the world.
About half the tap water in the US is contaminated with PFAs, an undesirable group of industrial chemicals that negatively affect the quality of our drinking water. The new technology, called Suspended Ion Exchange, somehow allows PFAs to be removed during downstream filtration.
The EPA has proposed new federal regulations requiring utilities to remove PFAs from drinking water before they get to households, so Tampa’s ahead of the game. About a third of Florida’s water treatment facilities currently exceed the limits the EPA has proposed.
SIX was actually piloted by the Tampa Water Department in 2020. The results of the pilot were that SIX would reduce the amount of chemicals needed to treat our drinking water by enough to save a cool 1.4 million bucks a year, not to mention improve the quality of our drinking water.
