Protect People.
Restore Land and Water.
Build America Right.

Protect People First

The contamination isn't one chemical. It's layers of them — in different combinations, in different places, often in the same glass of water.

What's in the water. PFAS is the contaminant that made the headlines. But lead still poisons children in cities that replaced zero pipes. Arsenic occurs naturally in aquifers serving millions of private wells no federal agency tests. Nitrates from agricultural runoff push rural systems past safe limits every spring. Trichloroethylene lingers in groundwater decades after the factory closed. Disinfection byproducts form in the treatment process itself. Forty-three million American households rely on private wells with zero federal testing requirements. Ever.

What's happening to the protections. Enforcement budgets are shrinking. State agencies are understaffed. Drinking water limits on known contaminants are being rolled back. The gap between what the law requires and what actually gets enforced is wider than it's been in decades.

What we do about it. The EPR Foundation tracks what's in America's water, air, and soil — the full picture, not the contaminant of the week. Our National Water Map puts contaminant data, Superfund sites, and industrial discharge records on a single searchable map so any parent, farmer, or community leader can see what's in their water and hold decision-makers accountable. Since launch, the map has made data from 381,000 water systems publicly accessible for the first time in a format ordinary people can actually use.

Data that lives in a government database nobody reads isn't protecting anyone.

Design Safer Systems

Traditional chemistry taught us how to make things. It never taught us how to make them safely. Green chemistry closes that gap — designing products and processes that eliminate hazards at the molecular level. That's not regulation. That's engineering.