Terms of use

1. The agreement

These terms are a binding agreement between you and Umwelt, a property of QEIP LLC ("Umwelt", "we", "us"), governing your use of umwelt.com and everything on it: the free reference pages, the free address check, the Address Environmental Report, the Watch and Pro subscriptions, the data downloads and the provider introduction form.

By using the site you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the site. If you are using it on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you are authorised to bind that organisation, and "you" means both you and it.

You must be at least 18 years old to buy anything here. Nothing on this site is directed at children and we do not knowingly collect information from them.

2. What this site provides

Umwelt republishes environmental records collected and published by United States federal agencies, principally the Environmental Protection Agency, and sells a per-address reading of those records. Specifically:

• Reference pages for counties, states, Superfund sites and public water systems, compiled from federal datasets and free to read.
• The free address check, which reports counts of what appears near an address without naming individual records.
• The Address Environmental Report, a paid document naming the recorded sites, facilities, tank releases and water results around one address, with distances.
• Monitoring subscriptions, which re-run an address periodically and email you when what the record shows about it changes.
• Data downloads of the compiled tables the site itself renders from.

Every figure carries the dataset it came from and the date it was retrieved. Federal records can lag reality by months or years, contain errors of their own, and carry coordinate accuracy limits that we report but cannot improve on. We take reasonable care in compiling and presenting them and we correct errors when they are found, but we do not warrant that any record is complete, current or accurate.

Our coverage is federal. Most contaminated sites in the United States are managed by state programmes and never appear in federal data. A page showing nothing is not evidence that nothing exists. This limitation is described in detail on the methodology page and you should read it before relying on anything here.

3. What it is not

This is the most important section of these terms, and the one most likely to matter to you later.

Nothing on this site is professional advice. It is not legal advice, not engineering advice, not environmental consulting, not real estate advice and not medical advice. We are a publisher of public records. We have no professional relationship with you, and reading this site does not create one.

Our reports are not Phase I Environmental Site Assessments. An Address Environmental Report does not comply with ASTM E1527-21, does not satisfy the All Appropriate Inquiries rule at 40 CFR Part 312, and confers no liability protection under CERCLA or any other statute. It includes no site visit, no historical land use research, no interviews and no opinion by an Environmental Professional. If you need those protections, engage a licensed environmental professional. Our guide to Phase I assessments explains what the difference actually consists of.

We never certify that a property is safe or contaminated. We report what records exist and where they are. Records cannot support a verdict about a specific property, and any site that gives you one is telling you something it does not know. Absence of a record is not evidence of absence of contamination.

We do not assess health risk. Whether a measured level of anything matters to a particular person is a clinical question that depends on dose, duration and individual circumstances. Take it to a clinician, not to a website.

4. Prohibited uses

You may not use this site, or anything obtained from it, to evaluate any person. That includes screening tenants, applicants, employees, borrowers or insureds. Our reports describe locations and public records about locations. They are not consumer reports, we are not a consumer reporting agency under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and using our material for any purpose regulated by that Act is a breach of these terms and may be a breach of federal law.

You also may not:

• scrape, crawl or bulk-extract the site for republication or resale (the data downloads exist precisely so you do not have to, and they are free);
• resell, sublicense or redistribute a purchased report as your own product;
• remove, obscure or contradict the notices in a report about what it is and is not, including if you pass it to a client;
• share, sell or publish a Pro key or a report link so that others obtain paid material without paying;
• attempt to defeat, probe or overload the site's technical measures, or use it to transmit anything unlawful;
• present our material in a way that suggests we endorse a property, a transaction, a provider or a conclusion.

We may suspend or terminate access for a breach of this section without refund, and will say why.

5. Purchases and refunds

Payments are processed by Stripe. We never see or store your card details. Prices are in US dollars and are shown before you pay.

The Address Environmental Report costs $39 and is a one-off purchase for one address. The address is resolved against the US Census geocoder before you are charged, so an address we cannot resolve is never billed. The report link is emailed to you and remains valid for 90 days, regenerating from the then-current records each time it is opened.

Refunds. Because a report is delivered immediately and is generated rather than stocked, purchases are generally final. We will nonetheless refund in full, without argument, if:

• the report failed to generate or was never delivered;
• you were charged more than once for the same address; or
• you tell us within 14 days that the report was not what you expected, and you have not made substantial use of it.

The last of those is deliberately generous. A report that tells you nothing useful because there is nothing on the record near your address is a legitimate reason to ask for your money back, and we would rather refund it than have you feel cheated by a null result. The free address check exists to prevent that situation arising at all.

6. Subscriptions and monitoring

Watch ($9 per month or $79 per year) monitors one address. Pro ($49 per month) provides unlimited report generation and monitoring for multiple addresses. Provider placement ($199 per month) provides a disclosed listing and introductions.

Subscriptions renew automatically until cancelled. You may cancel at any time through the billing link in every email we send you; cancellation takes effect at the end of the current paid period and we do not pro-rate part-months. We will give at least 30 days' notice by email before increasing the price of an existing subscription.

What monitoring does and does not promise. We re-run your address against our datasets on a regular schedule and email you when the records change. We do not promise to detect a change immediately, to detect every change, or to detect anything that the underlying federal data does not report. Monitoring watches the public record, not the ground: a site can appear in your alert because an agency published a file, not because anything physically changed. Records may also lag real events by a long time. Monitoring is not a safety service and must not be relied on as one.

The first run after you subscribe records a baseline and deliberately sends nothing, so you are not alerted about conditions that already existed when you signed up.

7. Access links and keys

There are no passwords on this site. Access to paid material is by signed link: a report link, a Pro key, or a billing management link. These are personal to you and function as credentials.

Anyone holding your link can use it. Treat links as you would a password, and tell us at hello@umwelt.com if one is exposed so we can invalidate it. We are not responsible for use of a link you have shared or allowed to be shared.

8. Intellectual property and reuse

The underlying federal data is in the public domain and we claim no rights over it. You do not need our permission to use it, and we publish it as CSV so that you can.

Our compilation, joins, slugs, written guides, explanatory text, design and code are ours. You may quote from the site with attribution and a link, and you may cite our figures freely. You may not republish substantial portions of our written material as your own, or rebuild a competing product out of our compiled tables.

If you are a journalist, researcher, teacher or public interest group and you want to do something with this material that these terms seem to prohibit, write to us. The answer is usually yes.

9. Providers and third parties

The site links to third-party providers of testing, treatment and remediation services, and to products through affiliate programmes. Those relationships are described in full on the disclosures page.

We do not perform, supervise or guarantee any provider's work, and a paid placement is advertising rather than a recommendation. Any contract you enter with a provider is between you and them. Check their licensing and insurance yourself.

We link to external sites, including agency records. We are not responsible for their content or availability.

10. Disclaimer of warranties

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the site and everything on it are provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the site will be uninterrupted, that data will be current or error-free, that any record reflects present conditions, or that any monitoring alert will reach you.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

11. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, neither Umwelt nor QEIP LLC nor anyone working with us is liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, lost opportunity, diminution in property value, or the cost of remediation, arising from your use of this site or reliance on anything in it, even if we were told such damages were possible.

Our total liability for any claim is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or $100 if you paid us nothing.

Nothing in these terms excludes liability for fraud, for fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything that cannot lawfully be excluded.

You accept that this allocation of risk is a reasonable basis for providing detailed environmental records at $39 rather than at the price of a professional assessment, and that we would not offer the service on other terms.

12. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify us against any claim, loss or expense arising from your breach of these terms, your misuse of the site, or your use of our material to evaluate a person in breach of section 4.

13. Changes and termination

We may change these terms. If a change is material we will note it on this page and update the review date at the top; for subscribers we will also email before it takes effect. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept it.

We may change, suspend or discontinue any part of the site. If we discontinue a paid product you have an unexpired subscription to, we will refund the unused portion.

You may stop using the site at any time. Sections 8, 10, 11, 12 and 14 survive.

14. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, without regard to its conflict of laws rules.

Before starting formal proceedings, please write to hello@umwelt.com and give us 30 days to resolve the matter. Most things are fixable by email, and we would rather fix them.

Any dispute not resolved that way shall be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Delaware, and both parties consent to that jurisdiction. Claims must be brought individually and not as part of a class or representative action.

If any provision of these terms is held unenforceable, the rest remains in effect and the provision is limited to the minimum extent necessary.

15. Contact

Umwelt is operated by QEIP LLC. Write to hello@umwelt.com for anything: support, refunds, corrections, permissions, legal notices or complaints. We read everything that arrives there.