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.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1363631886/1741170363/articles/avgn3I4vV1741260334699/6199141947.jpg]
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.
Wurtsmith Air Force Base, which sits on Oscoda’s Van Etten Lake, has long been a presence in the region. Established in 1923, the base played a notable role in World War II, when the Tuskegee Airmen briefly trained there. It was also the lifeblood of industry and employment for Oscoda and the surrounding areas until it was decommissioned in 1993. Wiltse, who served as Oscoda Township supervisor from 1992 to 2000, was among those leading the charge to redevelop the decommissioned site so the community wouldn’t feel as if “the federal government has pulled the rug out from under us,” he says. Wiltse knew there would be environmental issues to contend with—but no one could have foreseen just how serious the problem would prove to be.
To understand the scale of the problem Wiltse is trying to solve in the private sector, it helps to know a bit about activists like Tony Spaniola, who helped bring Oscoda’s PFAS problem to light. In 2016, Spaniola received a letter in the mail. The 66-year-old business attorney lives in the Detroit suburbs, but he and his family own a vacation home in Oscoda. Their backyard looks out over Van Etten Lake, which also washes up against Wurtsmith. For decades during its operational years, military firefighters at Wurtsmith had used fire suppressant packed with PFAS during routine drills. The letter, Spaniola recounts, said the home was located in the base’s “zone of concern” for PFAS contamination and warned the family not to drink the water. The notice was a life-changing jolt.
PFAS, which stands for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, have been manufactured and used since the 1940s for their flame-resistant, water-resistant, stain-resistant, and durability-promoting properties. These attributes have made them popular for use in various industrial and consumer products, from firefighting foam to nonstick coatings on cookware. They earned their “forever chemicals” moniker from a strong molecular bond that does not easily break down, meaning the chemicals build up in the environment and bioaccumulate in people, plants, and animals following repeated and high exposure. Even at extremely low levels, PFAS are toxic to humans, and have been linked to various cancers, increased cholesterol levels, depressed immune response, hormonal changes, and decreased fertility in women.
Spaniola began to ask questions: If the water was unsafe to drink now, that means it has been unsafe to drink for how long? What are the impacts on family members? How do we live with this going forward?
“You really begin to realize how much you rely on your water,” he says. “How many times you brush your teeth, you take a shower, you water your lawn, you grow your plants.”
Although Spaniola had never heard of PFAS before, he was already armed with more knowledge than most people who face an environmental crisis. He had lived through Michigan’s other environmental tragedies, including the polybrominated biphenyls (PBBs) contamination in the 1970s and the intractable lead crisis in Flint, which made national news in 2014. Spaniola took a gap year from his undergraduate studies at Harvard University to return home to Michigan in 1977 to study the unfolding PBBs fiasco alongside his father, a state representative who had taken up the fight.
“To have all that background and then get a letter from the health department in 2016 was really a jarring experience, as you might imagine,” he says.
A few weeks later, Spaniola attended a town hall meeting called by the state of Michigan to learn about options for people affected by PFAS. It was at one of these meetings that Spaniola met Bob Delaney, a Michigan Department of Environmental Quality geologist who seemed to know more than most about the crisis. Delaney had flagged PFAS contamination and potential toxicity at Wurtsmith as far back as 2010 and penned a seminal report with findings and recommendations in 2012. His research was broadly ignored by department leadership for years, during which time Oscoda residents like Wiltse and Spaniola were unknowingly exposed. Delaney would ultimately approach the media with his story in 2017. Once it broke to a broader audience in 2018, local news organization MLive called the report “prophetic.”
“There have been people for a long time who knew that these chemicals were harmful, and who knew that there were problems in my community, who never said a word,” Spaniola says. “We were never given a chance to even have the opportunity to make our own decisions about how we might want to deal with the problem.”
Although much of what Spaniola was learning in the meetings and from Delaney was damning, it wasn’t until a thick foam began to wash up on the beaches of Van Etten Lake that he decided to organize. In 2017, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services tested the foam—residue from chemicals used at the base—and found that it contained PFAS Consumer goods are a well-studied source of PFAS at more than 550 times today’s limits for drinking water, but maintained that “incidental swallowing” would not likely cause harm. Subsequent tests revealed even more astronomical levels of contamination. “When you talk about red flags, that was a pretty big red flag,” Spaniola says.
He began organizing with fellow citizens to demand action from lawmakers on PFAS. Spaniola co-founded Need Our Water (NOW), and Delaney would eventually join as a volunteer technical adviser. Among other issues, the group successfully pushed for $10 million in federal funding, administered by the state, to extend water lines to Oscoda residents and free blood testing for community members. The NOW model later helped form the basis of the Great Lakes PFAS Action Network (GLPAN), which Spaniola co-founded in 2020 to advocate for affected communities statewide. He is also on the leadership team of the National PFAS Contamination Coalition (NPCC).
Spaniola’s roles with NOW, GLPAN, and NPCC allowed him to successfully push the Department of Defense to issue a national directive in 2023, mandating “early action” to mitigate contamination on its military sites, which is designed to help Oscoda and communities far beyond.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1363631886/1741170363/articles/avgn3I4vV1741260334699/4679994776.jpg]
Previous spread, right: Testing equipment at Enviro Lab Services. Above: Wiltse (top photo, far left) leads Enviro Lab Services, located on the grounds of the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base. The company's lab tests for numerous substances, including PFAS, a toxic and pernicious group of nearly 15,000 chemicals.
Oscoda, Michigan, is just one of numerous communities across the broader U.S. grappling with PFAS crises. Wilmington, North Carolina, for example, has been dealing for years with contamination from PFAS related to a Chemours manufacturing facility along the Cape Fear River. Even individuals who are not living in a PFAS hot spot have more than likely been exposed from consuming contaminated food or water, breathing contaminated air, or using products such as nonstick cookware, cleaning supplies, and even personal care items like dental floss, makeup, and menstrual products.
A study published in Environment International in August 2023 estimates that at least one PFAS chemical was found in 45 percent of U.S. drinking water samples, and some 97 percent of Americans have PFAS in their blood, according to the National Institutes of Health. In April 2024, the EPA restricted the levels of six different PFAS in drinking water.
Meanwhile, state governments are also taking on PFAS. Massachusetts and Connecticut, for example, are phasing out PFAS in firefighting gear. And more than a dozen states have passed laws restricting the use of PFAS in everything from personal care products to textiles.
The work of advocates like Spaniola has been crucial in drawing the government’s attention to PFAS and holding polluters accountable, whereas entrepreneurs like Wiltse are pioneering remediation solutions.
Wiltse’s business ambitions started with his restaurant, Wiltse’s Brewpub & Family Restaurant, which would become a fixture in the Michigan craft beer scene and was a community institution throughout its 44 years of business. (Beloved staples included dinner rolls baked in-house.) When the base closed in 1993, taking with it most of the eatery’s customers, Wiltse pivoted into brewing to bring in new revenue. He also served as president of Oscoda’s Chamber of Commerce in the early '90s, in addition to his eight-year stint as township supervisor, a role akin to mayor.
Wiltse, who studied chemistry during stints at the University of Michigan and Saginaw Valley State University, realized that many cleaning products meant for the hospitality sector contained harsh chemicals that weren’t designed with the environment in mind. So in 2008, he started Enviro-Brite Solutions, an EPA-certified disinfectant and cleaning supply business. Today its products serve more than 280 breweries, plus convenience stores and hotels.
In 2013, Wiltse began offering testing services for adjacent businesses like breweries and wineries, but it wasn’t until 2019 that the growing PFAS crisis prompted Wiltse to spin his testing services into a separate business, Enviro Lab Services. He purchased instruments capable of conducting the same sorts of sensitive tests used to detect PFAS that agencies like the EPA were already employing. He began testing for PFAS in local water and wildlife, as well as offering half-price services to impacted residents.
“Without a local laboratory, we were going to be reliant on other folks to provide the data that’s so important for future decision-making,” Wiltse says. “We thought it would be a really great idea to invest in the instrumentation and the manpower to be able to test for PFAS.”
In 2022, the PFAS problem hit home for Wiltse. Like Spaniola, he received a letter in the mail. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services wrote that it was interested in testing residents from the community for PFAS in their blood.
Wiltse’s home is located on Van Etten Creek, a small waterway fed by the contaminated lake. He says he would regularly eat the tomatoes, corn, and green beans that he grew in his backyard and irrigated from the creek.
Wiltse agreed to the testing. He would have to wait about a year for his results.
Enviro Lab Services is part of a growing industry of entrepreneurs and innovators dedicated to mitigating the PFAS crisis. Academics and entrepreneurs across the U.S. are researching, scaling, and commercializing methods of PFAS testing, removal, and even destruction.
Chicago-based Cyclopure offers some PFAS testing, but the bulk of its business falls into the removal category. The company was co-founded...
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1363631886/1741170363/articles/avgn3I4vV1741260334699/6199141947.jpg]
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.
Wurtsmith Air Force Base, which sits on Oscoda’s Van Etten Lake, has long been a presence in the region. Established in 1923, the base played a notable role in World War II, when the Tuskegee Airmen briefly trained there. It was also the lifeblood of industry and employment for Oscoda and the surrounding areas until it was decommissioned in 1993. Wiltse, who served as Oscoda Township supervisor from 1992 to 2000, was among those leading the charge to redevelop the decommissioned site so the community wouldn’t feel as if “the federal government has pulled the rug out from under us,” he says. Wiltse knew there would be environmental issues to contend with—but no one could have foreseen just how serious the problem would prove to be.
To understand the scale of the problem Wiltse is trying to solve in the private sector, it helps to know a bit about activists like Tony Spaniola, who helped bring Oscoda’s PFAS problem to light. In 2016, Spaniola received a letter in the mail. The 66-year-old business attorney lives in the Detroit suburbs, but he and his family own a vacation home in Oscoda. Their backyard looks out over Van Etten Lake, which also washes up against Wurtsmith. For decades during its operational years, military firefighters at Wurtsmith had used fire suppressant packed with PFAS during routine drills. The letter, Spaniola recounts, said the home was located in the base’s “zone of concern” for PFAS contamination and warned the family not to drink the water. The notice was a life-changing jolt.
PFAS, which stands for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, have been manufactured and used since the 1940s for their flame-resistant, water-resistant, stain-resistant, and durability-promoting properties. These attributes have made them popular for use in various industrial and consumer products, from firefighting foam to nonstick coatings on cookware. They earned their “forever chemicals” moniker from a strong molecular bond that does not easily break down, meaning the chemicals build up in the environment and bioaccumulate in people, plants, and animals following repeated and high exposure. Even at extremely low levels, PFAS are toxic to humans, and have been linked to various cancers, increased cholesterol levels, depressed immune response, hormonal changes, and decreased fertility in women.
Spaniola began to ask questions: If the water was unsafe to drink now, that means it has been unsafe to drink for how long? What are the impacts on family members? How do we live with this going forward?
“You really begin to realize how much you rely on your water,” he says. “How many times you brush your teeth, you take a shower, you water your lawn, you grow your plants.”
Although Spaniola had never heard of PFAS before, he was already armed with more knowledge than most people who face an environmental crisis. He had lived through Michigan’s other environmental tragedies, including the polybrominated biphenyls (PBBs) contamination in the 1970s and the intractable lead crisis in Flint, which made national news in 2014. Spaniola took a gap year from his undergraduate studies at Harvard University to return home to Michigan in 1977 to study the unfolding PBBs fiasco alongside his father, a state representative who had taken up the fight.
“To have all that background and then get a letter from the health department in 2016 was really a jarring experience, as you might imagine,” he says.
A few weeks later, Spaniola attended a town hall meeting called by the state of Michigan to learn about options for people affected by PFAS. It was at one of these meetings that Spaniola met Bob Delaney, a Michigan Department of Environmental Quality geologist who seemed to know more than most about the crisis. Delaney had flagged PFAS contamination and potential toxicity at Wurtsmith as far back as 2010 and penned a seminal report with findings and recommendations in 2012. His research was broadly ignored by department leadership for years, during which time Oscoda residents like Wiltse and Spaniola were unknowingly exposed. Delaney would ultimately approach the media with his story in 2017. Once it broke to a broader audience in 2018, local news organization MLive called the report “prophetic.”
“There have been people for a long time who knew that these chemicals were harmful, and who knew that there were problems in my community, who never said a word,” Spaniola says. “We were never given a chance to even have the opportunity to make our own decisions about how we might want to deal with the problem.”
Although much of what Spaniola was learning in the meetings and from Delaney was damning, it wasn’t until a thick foam began to wash up on the beaches of Van Etten Lake that he decided to organize. In 2017, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services tested the foam—residue from chemicals used at the base—and found that it contained PFAS Consumer goods are a well-studied source of PFAS at more than 550 times today’s limits for drinking water, but maintained that “incidental swallowing” would not likely cause harm. Subsequent tests revealed even more astronomical levels of contamination. “When you talk about red flags, that was a pretty big red flag,” Spaniola says.
He began organizing with fellow citizens to demand action from lawmakers on PFAS. Spaniola co-founded Need Our Water (NOW), and Delaney would eventually join as a volunteer technical adviser. Among other issues, the group successfully pushed for $10 million in federal funding, administered by the state, to extend water lines to Oscoda residents and free blood testing for community members. The NOW model later helped form the basis of the Great Lakes PFAS Action Network (GLPAN), which Spaniola co-founded in 2020 to advocate for affected communities statewide. He is also on the leadership team of the National PFAS Contamination Coalition (NPCC).
Spaniola’s roles with NOW, GLPAN, and NPCC allowed him to successfully push the Department of Defense to issue a national directive in 2023, mandating “early action” to mitigate contamination on its military sites, which is designed to help Oscoda and communities far beyond.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1363631886/1741170363/articles/avgn3I4vV1741260334699/4679994776.jpg]
Previous spread, right: Testing equipment at Enviro Lab Services. Above: Wiltse (top photo, far left) leads Enviro Lab Services, located on the grounds of the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base. The company's lab tests for numerous substances, including PFAS, a toxic and pernicious group of nearly 15,000 chemicals.
Oscoda, Michigan, is just one of numerous communities across the broader U.S. grappling with PFAS crises. Wilmington, North Carolina, for example, has been dealing for years with contamination from PFAS related to a Chemours manufacturing facility along the Cape Fear River. Even individuals who are not living in a PFAS hot spot have more than likely been exposed from consuming contaminated food or water, breathing contaminated air, or using products such as nonstick cookware, cleaning supplies, and even personal care items like dental floss, makeup, and menstrual products.
A study published in Environment International in August 2023 estimates that at least one PFAS chemical was found in 45 percent of U.S. drinking water samples, and some 97 percent of Americans have PFAS in their blood, according to the National Institutes of Health. In April 2024, the EPA restricted the levels of six different PFAS in drinking water.
Meanwhile, state governments are also taking on PFAS. Massachusetts and Connecticut, for example, are phasing out PFAS in firefighting gear. And more than a dozen states have passed laws restricting the use of PFAS in everything from personal care products to textiles.
The work of advocates like Spaniola has been crucial in drawing the government’s attention to PFAS and holding polluters accountable, whereas entrepreneurs like Wiltse are pioneering remediation solutions.
Wiltse’s business ambitions started with his restaurant, Wiltse’s Brewpub & Family Restaurant, which would become a fixture in the Michigan craft beer scene and was a community institution throughout its 44 years of business. (Beloved staples included dinner rolls baked in-house.) When the base closed in 1993, taking with it most of the eatery’s customers, Wiltse pivoted into brewing to bring in new revenue. He also served as president of Oscoda’s Chamber of Commerce in the early '90s, in addition to his eight-year stint as township supervisor, a role akin to mayor.
Wiltse, who studied chemistry during stints at the University of Michigan and Saginaw Valley State University, realized that many cleaning products meant for the hospitality sector contained harsh chemicals that weren’t designed with the environment in mind. So in 2008, he started Enviro-Brite Solutions, an EPA-certified disinfectant and cleaning supply business. Today its products serve more than 280 breweries, plus convenience stores and hotels.
In 2013, Wiltse began offering testing services for adjacent businesses like breweries and wineries, but it wasn’t until 2019 that the growing PFAS crisis prompted Wiltse to spin his testing services into a separate business, Enviro Lab Services. He purchased instruments capable of conducting the same sorts of sensitive tests used to detect PFAS that agencies like the EPA were already employing. He began testing for PFAS in local water and wildlife, as well as offering half-price services to impacted residents.
“Without a local laboratory, we were going to be reliant on other folks to provide the data that’s so important for future decision-making,” Wiltse says. “We thought it would be a really great idea to invest in the instrumentation and the manpower to be able to test for PFAS.”
In 2022, the PFAS problem hit home for Wiltse. Like Spaniola, he received a letter in the mail. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services wrote that it was interested in testing residents from the community for PFAS in their blood.
Wiltse’s home is located on Van Etten Creek, a small waterway fed by the contaminated lake. He says he would regularly eat the tomatoes, corn, and green beans that he grew in his backyard and irrigated from the creek.
Wiltse agreed to the testing. He would have to wait about a year for his results.
Enviro Lab Services is part of a growing industry of entrepreneurs and innovators dedicated to mitigating the PFAS crisis. Academics and entrepreneurs across the U.S. are researching, scaling, and commercializing methods of PFAS testing, removal, and even destruction.
Chicago-based Cyclopure offers some PFAS testing, but the bulk of its business falls into the removal category. The company was co-founded...
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Inc. (Digital) - 1 Issue, Spring 2025