Article Masthead

  • Category: Capital Projects & Optimization
  • Topic: PFAS Drinking Water Treatment
  • Region: North America
  • Signal Type: Project Procurement / Construction Readiness
  • Published Date: 2026-09-22
  • Original Source Date: 2026-09-22

01 What Happened

The City of Rome, Georgia, said on September 22 that progress is continuing on its planned Reverse Osmosis Water Treatment Facility. During a September 18 vendor outreach meeting at the ECO Center, representatives from Archer Western reviewed the project site plan with more than 50 potential bidders, including contractors, subcontractors and suppliers.

Rome Water and Sewer Division Director John Boyd said residents could see work begin at the Riverside Parkway site as early as the first quarter of 2027. The city states that the new facility will use advanced reverse osmosis (RO) technology to remove PFAS from Rome’s drinking water.

The project is already beyond a purely conceptual stage. Georgia Public Broadcasting reported in August that the Rome City Commission approved approximately USD 34 million for RO-related equipment. Rome’s 2026 Water Quality Report also identifies PFAS in the river-water context and says the city is designing and constructing an RO plant intended to remove PFAS from drinking water.

02 Key Takeaways

01 Rome has moved its PFAS RO project into a procurement-readiness phase, with more than 50 potential bidders participating in vendor outreach.

02 The city now points to Q1 2027 as the earliest visible start of work at the Riverside Parkway site.

03 RO is being selected here as a municipal PFAS-control barrier, but the engineering challenge extends beyond membrane rejection to pretreatment, recovery, concentrate handling and long-term operating cost.

03 Why It Matters

Full-scale municipal RO for PFAS is still a relatively consequential choice because high-pressure membranes treat more than the target contaminant. They can reject PFAS very effectively, but they also reject salts and many other dissolved constituents, which changes energy demand, recovery, corrosion/scaling control and residuals management.

EPA technical material identifies GAC, ion exchange and high-pressure membranes such as RO/NF among effective PFAS drinking-water treatment technologies. For a project choosing RO, the water utility therefore has to manage not only finished-water quality but also membrane fouling potential and the concentrated reject stream.

Rome is also important as a market signal. A project that brings dozens of contractors and suppliers into early outreach suggests that PFAS compliance is translating into substantial municipal procurement demand across membranes, pretreatment, pumping, instrumentation, residuals handling and construction services.

04 ATLAS Engineering View

ATLAS views the central engineering question as what happens to the PFAS after separation. RO does not make the rejected contaminant disappear; it transfers PFAS and other rejected solutes into a smaller concentrate stream. The project’s environmental performance therefore depends on how recovery is selected and how concentrate is managed.

Pretreatment will also be decisive. Surface-water variability, suspended solids, organic matter, hardness, silica and biological activity can all affect membrane reliability. The official September 22 update confirms RO as the core PFAS-removal technology, but it does not disclose a complete final treatment train, design recovery, membrane flux, concentrate-disposal route or finished-water post-treatment scheme. Those details should not be inferred until project documents confirm them.

For suppliers and engineers, the project is therefore more than a membrane order. It is a full treatment-system integration problem: source-water characterization, pretreatment, high-pressure membrane operation, recovery optimization, concentrate management and finished-water stabilization must work together.

05 Sources

Image Source and Usage Notice

Feature graphic: U.S. EPA — TRI National Analysis, PFAS chemical profile. The graphic is used for editorial context and is not a photograph, rendering or process drawing of Rome’s planned facility. ATLAS WTS does not claim ownership of the EPA graphic, and no EPA endorsement of ATLAS WTS is implied.

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