No, it's not. From the linked article, decaf coffee grounds produced using one specific method have 0.1 ppm of dichloromethane 'paint stripper' remaining ("100

No, it's not. From the linked article, decaf coffee grounds produced using one specific method have 0.1 ppm of dichloromethane 'paint stripper' remaining ("100 times less" than the FDA limit of 10 ppm). Then this is used to brew a pot of coffee, presumably diluting by another order of magnitude (a common ratio is about 1 part coffee grounds to 8 parts water). Except that in reality, dichloromethane isn't actually soluble/miscible in water, so there's no reason to expect even the 0.01 ppm to be in the cup you're drinking from; the majority of the trace that's in the grounds probably stays there. In fact, the immiscibility in water is critical to the decaffeination process, allowing the solvent (with the bound caffeine) to be easily skimmed off and removed. The process described is also wrong. The beans are not "returned to reabsorb the liquid". This doesn't even make sense, since the liquid in the water bath was never in the beans to begin with. Instead, the author has confused that the bath, reused batch to batch, quickly reaches the same concentration of water-soluble compounds (other than the caffeine, which is repeatedly removed) as the beans, so when fresh beans are bathed in the liquid, only the caffeine has a gradient to migrate away. In this sense, beans, in general, are constantly introduced to the same bath, but no resorption happens. Beans are only reintroduced to the bath if further decaffeination is required (most processes, including organic solvents, require several passes to eliminate >97% of the caffeine to meet the standard for decaffeinated coffee). Dichloromethane is actually not used in paint stripper in either the US and EU. It's also not the only organic solvent used for decaffeination. A common alternative is ethyl acetate, an ester that occurs naturally in fruit and wine. Other alternatives include CO2-based extraction. It's unlikely that 'the majority' of decaf coffee is produced using dichloromethane extraction; the author certainly provides no citation for this claim. This is just a submarine ad for products using an alternative, more expensive decaffination process that is almost identical to organic solvent extraction, using the same sort of bath from which caffeine is extracted to set up a gradient on caffeine only. The only difference is that activated charcoal filtration is used to remove the caffeine from the bath. I suspect that activated charcoal removes more species than just caffeine in that process, which would explain the author's report that the grounds from that process, already "a lot more expensive" are "weaker, so you have to use more ground powder to make a coffee".