The world immediately around you

1. The word

Umwelt is the ordinary German word for environment. It entered English through biology: Jakob von Uexküll used it in the 1900s for the world as one organism actually experiences it, the slice of reality a tick or a dog or a person can perceive and act within. Two creatures standing in the same field inhabit different Umwelten.

That second meaning is why the site is called this. It does not cover "the environment" as a subject. It answers one question, asked from one point on the map: what is around this address, according to the public record? Not the planet's environment. Yours. The half mile that decides what is in your water, your soil and your air.

2. Why it exists

Before a commercial property changes hands in the United States, somebody orders an environmental records search. It costs between $375 and $850, it is sold through consultants, and it is assembled almost entirely from federal databases that are public and free.

Roughly four million existing homes change hands every year and their buyers get none of it. The records are public, but they are scattered across bulk data files, agency mapping tools and formats that assume you can write code. In practice the professionals have an answer and everybody else has a search box.

That gap widened sharply in 2025 and 2026. EPA removed EJScreen, its public environmental screening tool, in February 2025. The Council on Environmental Quality's screening tool followed. In March 2026 the lawsuit seeking their restoration was dismissed. In May 2026 EPA moved to rescind four of the six federal PFAS drinking water limits and pushed compliance for the remaining two to 2031, while states set their own limits and diverged from one another.

The information did not disappear. The straightforward way for an ordinary person to look up their own surroundings did. This site is an attempt to put that back, and to keep its own copy of every underlying file so that the next removal does not take it away again.

3. What is here

Every page is generated from a federal dataset row. Nothing is written from memory, nothing is modelled, and no page exists that does not correspond to real records.

• 3,143 county records, each carrying its cleanup sites, water systems, reporting polluters, fuel tank figures and radon zone.
• 1,840 Superfund site pages with status, hazard score, listing history and links to EPA's own file on each.
• 10,313 public water systems from the national PFAS testing round, each with its full per-compound results.
• 21,482 facilities reporting toxic releases in 2024.
• Guides explaining what the units, limits and status words mean, and CSV downloads of every compiled table, free.

Paid products sit on top: a per-address report at $39, and monitoring that emails you when the record around an address changes. Everything the reference pages contain stays free.

4. What is not here

Stated plainly, because a reference that hides its gaps is worse than no reference.

• State-managed sites. Our coverage is federal. Most contaminated sites in America are handled by state programmes and never enter federal data. A county page showing little is not evidence that little exists. Closing this gap is the largest piece of work ahead of us.
• Private wells. No federal drinking water rule applies to them and no system testing covers them. If you are on a well, only a laboratory test of that well tells you anything.
• Small water systems. The national PFAS round tested every system serving over 3,300 people and only a sample of smaller ones. A blank row can mean untested.
• Verdicts. This site will not tell you whether a property is safe. Records cannot support that judgement, and a site that offers one is telling you something it does not know.
• Professional assessments. Our report is not an ASTM Phase I. It has no site visit, no historical land use research and no professional opinion, and it confers no liability protection.

5. The standards we hold to

• Source and date on everything. Every figure names the dataset it came from and when it was retrieved.
• Detections are detections; exceedances are exceedances. We flag a result as over the limit only where a limit is still law. Compounds whose standards were proposed for rescission are reported with their measured values and no invented threshold.
• Agency vocabulary first. We use EPA's exact status words, then translate them, rather than paraphrasing into something more alarming.
• Mirrors, not links. Every raw file is copied into our own repository at build time, so the site keeps working from its own copies if a source goes offline.
• Public corrections. Errors are logged with what broke and what fixed it, including ones found before launch.

6. Who runs it

Umwelt is operated by QEIP LLC, which runs a portfolio of reference publications built on public data. Its sister site lung.com covers radon and air quality in depth, and county pages here link across to it rather than duplicating that ground.

The site is produced with substantial use of AI working over federal datasets and published standards, which is how coverage at this scale is affordable enough for the reference pages to be free. The disclosures page says more about that, and the corrections log is the honest measure of how well the checks are working.

7. Contact and corrections

Write to hello@umwelt.com. A wrong figure is more useful to us than a compliment, and it gets fixed against the source dataset rather than negotiated.

If you are a journalist, researcher or public interest group and you want the data in a form we do not publish, ask. The answer is usually yes.