Commission on Pollution

A plain-English reference on air and water pollution terms, standards, and reports

A plain-English reference on air and water pollution terms, standards, and reports

This site is a small reference library for anyone trying to make sense of pollution information: the color-coded air quality number in a weather app, the annual water quality report that arrives with a utility bill, or a news story about a contaminant with an unfamiliar name.

Government agencies publish excellent data about air and water quality, but it comes wrapped in acronyms — AQI, NAAQS, MCL, ppb — and the units change from one document to the next. The pages here translate that vocabulary into plain English and point you to the official sources so you can read the originals with confidence.

Start with the concentration unit converter, which switches between the units used in water quality documents — milligrams per liter, micrograms per liter, ppm, and ppb — so you can compare a number on your local report against a published limit written in a different unit. Then browse the guides:

Everything here is background reference material. For decisions about health, testing, or remediation, the right stop is a licensed professional or your state and local environmental agencies — the guides tell you what to ask them.

Water Concentration Unit Converter

Water quality documents mix units freely: a regulation may state a limit in milligrams per liter while your utility's report lists results in parts per billion. For dilute solutions in water, these units convert with simple factors — 1 mg/L is equivalent to 1 ppm, and 1 µg/L is equivalent to 1 ppb. Enter a value in any unit to see it in all the others.

This converter handles units only, for dilute aqueous solutions where the standard equivalences hold. It does not interpret results or say whether a level is acceptable — compare numbers against the official limits published by EPA and your state, and direct questions about a specific result to your water utility or a certified laboratory.