Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Ryan, Myconaut · September 2026
Here is the map, as promised. One thing to say up front, because it decides how you read every number below. We did not try to count PFAS sites. Nobody can count those honestly from public records, and a page that pretended otherwise would be worth less than nothing to you. What we counted instead is the people who get paid to deal with contamination, grouped by who they are rather than by the problem they work on, because the thing that decides whether a new remedy gets used is not the size of the problem. It is which desk the purchase order comes off. There is nothing to buy at the end of this page.
5,957
US-based organizations whose primary declared line of business is environmental consulting or remediation services, and who are registered and active to take federal work. Count that same universe by anyone who claims either capability anywhere in their registration, and it becomes 24,327. Both numbers are real and they measure different things. The gap between them is the first useful thing on this page, and we come back to it.
Environmental consulting firms
The specification layer, and on the evidence the most important group on this page. These are the firms that write the remedial work plan, and a remedy that is not named in the work plan does not get deployed, no matter who owns the site. If a fungal treatment train is ever going to be used at scale, it gets there because a consulting principal wrote it into a plan and defended it to a regulator. That makes this group the gatekeeper rather than the customer, which is an uncomfortable distinction but a load-bearing one: they hold no budget and they decide almost everything.
Who to reach: principal or practice leader, remediation technology lead, the person who signs off on a remedial alternatives analysis. How they behave: they are paid to be conservative, because they carry professional liability on the recommendation.
3,344
by primary line of business; 16,340 claim the capability somewhere in their registration
Remediation contractors
The execution layer. They perform what the consultant specified and they carry the field risk when it does not perform. That risk position is the single biggest reason a new remedy stalls here, and it is worth being clear-eyed about it: a contractor bidding fixed price on a cleanup is not in a position to absorb an unproven treatment. They are the right buyer eventually and close to the wrong buyer first, which is a sequencing problem rather than a fit problem.
Who to reach: owner or principal, VP of operations, project manager on the specific site. How they behave: they follow the specification and they price the risk of anything new into the bid.
2,613
by primary line of business; 13,479 claim the capability somewhere in their registration
Analytical and testing laboratories
Not a buyer, and included precisely because the map would be misleading without them. Labs see a contamination result before the site owner has decided anything and long before a consultant has written a plan. They are the earliest point in the sequence at which anybody knows there is a problem worth solving. Treated as a referral and relationship layer rather than a sales target, this is the cheapest early-warning network in the market.
Who to reach: laboratory director, technical director on the relevant methods. What they are worth: timing and introductions, not revenue.
1,718
by primary line of business; 9,145 claim the capability somewhere in their registration
Federal research and demonstration contract holders
The largest number on this page and the least like a customer, which is why it sits fourth rather than first. This is the universe of organizations registered to hold federal research and development work in the physical, engineering and life sciences. It matters here for one reason only: it is the one lane in this market that is structurally willing to fund a remedy before it is proven, because demonstrating unproven remedies is what the lane exists to do. Everything else on this page wants field evidence first. This is where field evidence comes from.
Who to reach: program or technical monitors on relevant demonstration programs, and the prime contractors who assemble teams for them. What it buys: a defensible field result, which is the currency every other lane on this page is asking for.
8,643
by primary line of business; 26,419 claim the capability somewhere in their registration
Drinking water systems, on the page as scale and not as buyers
This is the loudest lane in the PFAS market and, on our read, the furthest from you. There are 49,378 active community water systems in the country, 9,619 of them serving more than 3,300 people, and 8,108 of those are owned by a unit of local government. That is genuine scale and it is where the regulatory noise is. But these systems buy engineered treatment for water at a point of entry, and the installed answer is carbon, ion exchange and membranes. It is a different physical problem from breaking down contamination in soil and organic matter. We put the number here so the page is honest about what it is choosing to walk past, not to suggest a route in.
Why the direction of travel matters: the federal drinking water limits finalized in April 2024 covered six PFAS. In May 2026 two proposals went out for public comment, one keeping the limits for the two best known compounds while offering systems an option to take two more years to comply, and one proposing to withdraw the limits for four others. Both are proposals, not settled law. Either way the pull in this lane is toward treating water on a longer clock, not toward new soil chemistry.
Context, not a target
49,378 active community systems, 9,619 above 3,300 people served
The three lanes closest to your actual work, and the ones we will not put a number on
Sludge and biosolids headed for land application, landfill leachate, and defense sites where firefighting foam was used in training. On the physics, these are the closest fit to a biological treatment of contaminated organic matter of anything in this market, and it would be easy to put an impressive figure against each. We are not going to, because we could not stand behind any of the three. There is no public register that records which facilities have a PFAS problem, most landfills and treatment plants are municipal and never appear in the federal contractor register at all, and the defense side is real but its site-level detail is not something we can count from open sources without guessing. A number here would look exactly like the numbers above and mean something completely different.
What we can say: the money that gets spent on all three flows through the same 5,957 organizations counted at the top of this page. So the lanes are uncounted, but the route to them is not.
Deliberately uncounted
the public record cannot answer it, and we would rather show none than show a number you would have to defend later

Where the openings are

1
The order this market has to be worked in is the opposite of the order it is usually worked in. Every lane on this page except one wants field evidence before it will act, and one lane exists to produce field evidence. Working them in parallel treats the federal demonstration route as a funding line, which is how most technical founders read it. Working them in sequence treats it as the thing that unlocks the other 5,957, which is a different and much shorter path. The map does not tell you which is right for you. It does say the two are not interchangeable.
2
The purchase order and the decision sit at different desks, and almost everyone gets this backwards. The site owner holds the budget. The consulting firm decides what the budget is spent on, and there are 3,344 of them by primary business. Selling to owners while consultants have never heard of you produces polite interest that dies at the alternatives analysis. It is worth knowing which of the two conversations you are actually having before you decide it went well.
3
This channel is concentrated, and your own region is a real share of it. Five states hold 33.5% of the entire consulting and remediation channel: California 727, Florida 375, Texas 363, Colorado 292, New York 239. But the eight states around the Great Lakes hold 1,016 between them, 135 of those in Michigan alone. That is enough density to run a home-region proving ground where you can physically get to a site, and still leave a national channel of roughly six thousand to scale into afterward. Very few technical markets give you both.
4
The gap between 5,957 and 24,327 is the whole prospecting problem in one number. Six thousand organizations do this as their actual business. Twenty four thousand claim the capability somewhere on a registration, most of them because it is cheap to claim and occasionally useful to have. Any list built from the larger number will be four fifths noise and will feel like the market is not responding, when what is really happening is that the wrong four fifths were contacted. Whoever does this work, in house or otherwise, that distinction is the difference between a channel and a mailing list.
Built from two public federal registries, no commercial data. The organization counts come from the federal register of entities active and registered to receive federal awards, monthly extract dated 5 July 2026, filtered to active registrants only and counted both by primary declared line of business and by any capability claimed on the registration, which is why every row carries two figures. The water system counts come from the federal public drinking water system inventory, pulled 1 September 2026, filtered to active community systems. Three limits bound every number above. These registers record what an organization says about itself, not what it does, and nothing in either of them records who has a PFAS problem. The contractor register covers organizations set up to take federal work, so a firm doing only commercial and state work does not appear and the real market is larger than the count. And a registration is a compliance artifact, not evidence of capability or of revenue.
ENQUIRER CONSULTING GROUP
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