Just Add Atrazine

EPA’s Recent Actions on Atrazine Expose an Agency with Big Responsibilities and No Plan

Threatened Chiricahua leopard frog (Credit: Charles Peterson) CC BY-NC

Someone at EPA is in trouble. Although not supposed to be released until the third quarter of 2016, a new analysis of environmental impacts from the pesticide atrazine was accidentally posted online briefly last week before the EPA got wise and removed it. But not before we got our hands on it. The findings demonstrate the destructive power of this toxin: Atrazine was found to cause reproductive harm to mammals and birds in real-world scenarios, with EPA “levels of concern” surpassed nearly 200-fold. Also, water monitoring of rivers, lakes and streams showed atrazine to be present at levels much higher than are needed to kill amphibians, some of the most imperiled animals in the U.S.

Sadly the findings aren’t all that shocking — we’ve known about these problems for decades. This document is less of a revelation and more of an acknowledgement: EPA has failed. Not only have they failed for years, but they are still failing.

While banned in the European Union a dozen years ago, atrazine was reapproved in 2003 for use in the United States. It remains the second-most commonly used pesticide in the U.S., behind glyphosate, with around 70 million pounds used every year. It’s also a well-known hormone disruptor that has been linked to birth defects and cancer in people.

Atrazine is most infamous, however, for its transformative effects on frogs. Dr. Tyrone Hayes, at the University of California, has shown that atrazine chemically castrates and feminizes male frogs at concentrations lower than the level allowed in drinking water by the EPA. When the amount of atrazine allowed in our drinking water is high enough to turn a male tadpole into a female frog, then our regulatory system has failed us.

EPA’s unofficial position is that they’re trying to approve new pesticides so that atrazine will eventually get phased out. I don’t know what’s worse, the fact that Syngenta is still trying to claim that atrazine is safe, or that our very own Environmental Protection Agency is so beholden to chemical companies that their only plan to get rid of atrazine involves approving more toxic pesticides.

Case in point. A new pesticide called bicyclopyrone was just approved last year by the EPA and a condition of approval was that Syngenta take measures to reduce atrazine use by 14 million pounds in eight years. The problem is that the only product that currently contains bicyclcopyrone is called Acuron, which contains 3 different pesticides along with….you guessed it, atrazine. So in eight years we’ll have four different pesticides used where one used to suffice and 56 million pounds of atrazine to deal with. Way to lay it on ’em, EPA!

And if Acuron is not working to kill your weeds, the label directs the user to add more atrazine. “Just Add Atrazine” seems to be EPA’s mantra despite its own scientific findings that atrazine is likely harming most plants and animals in the U.S.

EPA is currently in the process of “registration review” of atrazine, a process designed to determine whether the chemical can safely be used in light of new scientific study. This assessment will inform EPA’s decision on whether to allow atrazine to be used for the next 15 years.

Something’s broken here and until it’s fixed — EPA will fix this, right? — people and wildlife will continue to pay a very dangerous price.

Dr. Nathan Donley works for the Center for Biological Diversity and is a regular contributor to its Medium publication