While the H2O chemical formula of water reveals that pure water consists of hydrogen and oxygen only, in reality a large variety of elements contribute to what we know as water – up to 76, to be accurate.
Considering that US law regulates only 19 of these elements, it seems clear that something is overlooked. For example, while lithium is known to be toxic to embryos and life threatening in high doses, there is no data available on what concentration in drinking water should be classified as dangerous.
That’s where stoichy comes into play: We not only can tell you whether your water has a lithium in it, but also highlight dangerous amounts and health effects.
Check our dynamic water map to view results from a range of locations and water types, read up about your zip code, compare your values to the neighborhood, throughout the US and the whole world.
Our goal in testing water is to contribute to your individual water safety. Using state-of-the art technology, stoichy tests almost all elements and emphasizes detection limits that are significantly lower than elsewhere.
Like others, stoichy uses inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). What differentiates our mass spectrometer is the size of the detector. It is large enough to detect 71 relevant elements from lithium to uranium simultaneously, providing a maximum range of highly sensitive results in a short time and at low cost.
Stoichy is a nonprofit project started at New York University. As a part of our Metabolic Ecology Project, our goal is to generate fingerprints of the elemental composition of waters from different regions in order to correlate these fingerprints to geological, ecological and physiological properties.
People worldwide spend more than $100 billion dollars on bottled water each year, most in the US. The US Food and Drug Administration holds bottled water to Environmental Protection Agency standards only, which means that most bottled waters are unlikely to be very different from most municipal tap waters. While municipal waters must be held accountable for poor management, on the whole, there isn’t much difference between tap and bottled water. If we were to put the average tap water against the chart of bottled waters in our study, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
