Lake Huron, in Northern Michigan, may not be as mysterious as Lake Superior, or as beachy as Lake Michigan, but it boasts long stretches of shoreline, dotted with dunes, cliffs, forests, and towns that an estimated three million people call home. One of those small towns, tucked into the northeastern edge of the mitten, is earning a reputation for much more than its breathtaking views. Oscoda (pop. 7,200) is developing an industry around innovatively testing for and remediating PFAS, the toxic group of close to 15,000 chemicals that have blighted the region and so many others in the U.S.
Dean Wiltse, 67, is the founder and CFO of Enviro Lab Services, which he runs out of a building on the decommissioned Wurtsmith Air Force Base, about 200 miles north of Detroit. Founded in 2019, Enviro Lab Services tests and analyzes water, blood, soil, and biological tissue samples for everything from E. coli and metals to PFAS.
Wiltse offers discounted testing to cash-strapped innovators who are looking to prove their technologies could be scaled to remediate PFAS contamination. So far, Wiltse says, he has partnered up with companies as far away as British Columbia and New Jersey, as well as entrepreneurs closer to home. In one case, a Marquette, Michigan-based company called Myconaut that used Wiltse’s testing earned National Science Foundation grant funding to research whether fungi can break the bonds in PFAS. “My goal is to make Oscoda the innovative hub of all the technologies and all of the players working together to solve this problem, and then share what we learn,” Wiltse says.
There was a time when the sleepy community of Oscoda had never even heard of PFAS. Wiltse, who moved there in 1979 at 21 years old, was originally focused on running a family restaurant that he founded with his brother. Back then, the community did not yet know about the odorless, colorless chemicals contaminating their water.
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