The Environmental Protection & Restoration Foundation works to safeguard communities from real contaminants, restore damaged land and water, and build infrastructure that strengthens the places it serves. Practical solutions. Credible science. Durable results.
Lead in school drinking fountains. Arsenic in private wells. Industrial solvents in groundwater a town has relied on for generations. The threats are real, measured, and hidden in plain sight. We make them visible — and push for the fixes that actually close the exposure.
Green chemistry means building safety into the molecule — not cleaning up after the damage is done. Prevention is smarter, cheaper, and the only approach that scales.
Permits, enforcement actions, consent decrees, public notices — the system is designed to be unreadable. We make it legible so communities can hold decision-makers accountable.
Everything we do falls into one of five lanes — each one focused on making real, measurable progress.
The water coming out of the tap. The soil under the playground. The air downwind of the plant. The well in the backyard nobody's tested since it was drilled. Lead, arsenic, nitrates, TCE, PFAS, radium, and disinfection byproducts — specific chemicals in specific places affecting specific families. We track what's actually present where people live, not just what regulators require systems to report. Our National Water Map covers every state — hundreds of thousands of water systems, industrial discharges, and Superfund sites, searchable by anyone with a zip code. Data alone doesn't protect anyone. Action does.
Groundwater contamination. Degraded rivers. Closed landfills that still leach. Brownfields waiting for a second life. We work on the land and water systems that need restoration — not just monitoring.
America needs infrastructure — data centers, water systems, energy facilities. We advocate for building them in the right places, the right way, so they strengthen communities instead of burdening them.
Green chemistry means building safety into the molecule. Safer solvents. Non-toxic alternatives. Bio-based materials that work. Prevention at the design stage — not cleanup after the damage.
Permits, variances, enforcement budgets, consent decrees, public notices — the regulatory system is deliberately complex. We make it readable, searchable, and understandable so citizens can participate.
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.
Check Your WaterTraditional 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.
Read Our Research"Protect people. Restore land and water. Build America right. That's the work — and it's the only agenda we have."
Cited research. Real contaminants. Practical solutions.
For decades, a chemical plant south of Fayetteville, North Carolina quietly discharged PFAS into the Cape Fear River — contaminating the drinking water of more than half a million people. Then a pair of scientists, a river keeper, and a community of determined residents forced the world to pay attention.
Read More →Destroying PFAS once they're in the water is necessary. But the real revolution is happening upstream — in the labs, factories, and boardrooms where entire industries are proving you never needed forever chemicals in the first place.
Read More →This week the EPA launched a new Superfund cleanup initiative promising faster remediation at 1,340 contaminated sites. Two days later, the public comment period on rescinding drinking water protections for four PFAS compounds remains open. These two announcements tell a single story — and it is worth reading carefully.
Read More →The EPA held a press conference last week to announce it was rolling back drinking water protections for four PFAS compounds. They called it a "PFAS destruction event." The framing tells you everything you need to know about where federal policy is headed — and why states, not Washington, are now the front line of public health protection.
Read More →On May 22, 2026, the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper discovered thousands of dead fish along 20 miles of river in west Atlanta. The cause wasn't a chemical spill or an industrial accident. It was infrastructure — or rather, the failure of it.
Read More →The EPR Foundation is building something durable. If you want to contribute, partner, or report an environmental concern — reach out.
rip@eprfoundation.org