Blog
Stories and findings from LA's community microplastic water testing project.
We pulled EPA violation records for every water system in the LA area. LADWP and the other big city utilities filed on time and carry no open violations. 34 smaller systems — mobile home parks, school districts, mutual water companies — never submitted the federally required lead pipe inventory, and it's still an open violation.
Read more →More than half of every currently open health-based water violation in the US traces to one rule: the Lead and Copper Rule. And 89% of those — 2,973 violations at 2,968 systems — aren't a lead reading over the limit. They're a missed federal deadline: the Lead Service Line Inventory, due since October 2024.
Read more →When a US water system breaks a health rule, the median fix takes 90 days and 9 in 10 are resolved within six months. Then there's the tail: 183 systems have carried an open health-based EPA violation for more than ten years — one New York utility since June 1993, and four systems since 1992. Here's who they are.
Read more →236 of Puerto Rico's 424 public water systems — 55.7% — are under an open, unresolved, health-based EPA violation right now. That's nearly 9x the national rate (6.2%) and far ahead of the next-worst state, Connecticut, at 35.7%. The full breakdown, mapped.
Read more →6,719 American schools and daycares run their own public water system instead of buying city water. 381 are under an open health-based violation — and for 301 of them, the violation is that nobody has produced the lead service line inventory the EPA required by October 2024. Connecticut has cited 42% of its school systems. Twenty-two states have cited none. Every system, mapped.
Read more →We pulled the EPA's lead test results for the water systems serving America's 25 largest cities. None is over the federal action level — but New York City's 10 ppb is the highest of any big city, and it sits exactly at the stricter limit that takes effect in 2027. Chicago is second and rising. Seven cities report zero.
Read more →We pulled every PFAS measurement on record for U.S. public water systems. 240 systems nationwide are over the new federal limit — 131 of them in California alone, more than every other state combined. The reason isn't that California's water is uniquely contaminated. It's that California is one of the only states actually testing.
Read more →Drinking water violations by state, from the EPA's own records: 4,218 U.S. public water systems are under an open health-based violation right now — a rule set to protect your health, still unresolved. California has the most (801). Connecticut ranks third, ahead of Florida and Texas-sized states. The full list, mapped.
Read more →On April 2, 2026, the EPA added microplastics to its drinking water contaminant list for the first time. The same day, HHS committed $144 million to studying plastic in our bodies. Here's what happened, what the science says, and what you can do.
Read more →We bought Dasani, Liquid Death, Fiji, Evian, Crystal Geyser, San Pellegrino, and Path from a grocery store in LA. Every single one tested positive for particles consistent with microplastics. The aluminum cans scored just as high as the plastic bottles.
Read more →A 2022 peer-reviewed paper by Leonard et al. described a fluorescence imaging method for detecting microplastics down to 10 microns using a smartphone camera. We adapted that published protocol for our at-home kit.
Read more →Most LA homes were re-piped with PEX — a plastic pipe. Chlorine in the water degrades it, and the pipe sheds microplastic particles directly into your tap. Here's what a licensed plumber and our data are telling us.
Read more →Fluorescence microscopy results from 20+ residential tap water samples across West LA neighborhoods. Every sample contained microplastics.
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