More than 1 billion pounds of pesticides are used in the United States each year. They get applied to lawns, playgrounds, agricultural fields, and orchards.

It is Part of the EPA’s job to protect human and environmental health by regulating which pesticides are approved by gathering data, and weighing environmental/ human health risks that come with the chemicals nature.

Over the past 6 years the EPA has approved more than 100 pesticides for commercial use. Many of these contain mixtures of chemicals that magnify the toxicity and create volatile concoctions that significantly harm unintended targets. This effect is known as “Synergy” which can make normal exposure levels for people and wildlife extremely toxic. These chemicals have been widely overlooked by the EPA in the approval of pesticides that are used on food, lawns, and publicly accessible locations.

An extensive report has been released by the Center for Biological Diversity called: Toxic Concoctions: How The EPA Ignores The Dangers Of Pesticide Cocktails , This report sheds light on how the EPA goes about reviewing patent applications for pesticide products from 4 major agrochemical companies (Bayer, Dow, Monsanto and Syngenta).

Documentation of pesticides on the environment have been extensively documented, but for single isolated toxicity assessments. When deciding whether to approve a product the EPA stays within the realm of single assessments and fails to consider that many chemicals are combined either before or after application in the environment. The EPA often rationalizes this by stating that “studies measuring mixture toxicity are often not available for analysis”. This is far from the truth because Chemical companies are already gathering data on “Synergistic” effects and are just not sharing that data with the EPA.

The report states that these effects of synergy are publicly available information which can be gathered from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. It provides a disturbing snapshot of pesticide synergy and the potential for widespread danger to people, waterways and wildlife — risks the EPA has repeatedly failed to identify and consider during its approval process.

“The EPA is supposed to be the cop on the beat, protecting people and the environment from the dangers of pesticides,” Nathan Donley, a scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity and author of the report, said. “With these synergistic pesticides, the EPA has decided to look the other way and guess who’s left paying the price?”

The report has intensive research of patent applications that correlated to all pesticide products containing two or more active ingredients approved by the EPA in the past six years from four major agrochemical companies (Bayer, Dow, Monsanto and Syngenta).

Examination of approvals for the four companies showed that:

“69 percent of these products (96 out of 140) had at least one patent application that claimed or demonstrated synergy between the active ingredients in the product;”

“72 percent of the identified patent applications that claimed or demonstrated synergy involved some of the most highly used pesticides in the U.S., including glyphosate, atrazine, 2,4-D, dicamba and the neonicotinoids thiamethoxam, imidacloprid and clothianidin, among others.”

“It’s alarming to see just how common it’s been for the EPA to ignore how these chemical mixtures might endanger the health of our environment,” Donley said. “It’s pretty clear that chemical companies knew about these potential dangers, but the EPA never bothered to demand this information from them or dig a little deeper to find it for themselves.”









The EPA can only approve products if they show no reasonable negative affects to human and environmental health. When chemical companies file for EPA approval, they often file for patent protection, where most of the data about synergistic affects can be found. It is troubling that the EPA is willing to ignore this data and approve chemicals that are known to cause massive damage to environments and wildlife ecosystems.

Recognizing that pesticide synergy data are widely available and that the synergistic relationships between pesticides can have serious implications for human and environmental health, the EPA must now take action to properly consider the potential consequences of pesticide synergy. One main issue about the way the EPA operates is the tendency to rely on single assessments. Not taking into account that chemicals mix together is naive.

One related topic is foods. When foods are approved with preservatives and pesticide residue, they fail to take into account that humans tend to eat a wide variety of foods through out the day that also contain those chemicals. This means that by the end of the day people are going to bed with elevated levels of pesticides and preservatives in the body that are way over the safety levels set by the EPA. This in turn can have drastic health consequences, especially for children.

“The EPA has turned a blind eye for far too long to the reality that pesticide blends can have dangerous synergistic effects,” Donley said. “Now that we know about all the data that are out there, the EPA must take action to ensure that wildlife and the environment are protected from these chemical cocktails.”

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