EPA failures and global pesticide pollution

0:00While most jobs are overseen by OSHA, the work of protection standard is enforced and overseen by EPA, which happens to be the same regulatory authority that is in charge of approving pesticides in the first place. So it's really not a great system. It means I certainly wouldn't say OSHA is highly venerable and some sort of gold standard, but let me tell you, it's a whole heck of a lot better than EPA basically overseen an approval that it itself made. So what we see is the work of protection standard, which are things like, you know, an employer needs to provide the proper protection equipment for a worker like gloves and goggles and stuff like that. Or a worker needs to make sure that workers aren't in the fields when a helicopter comes over and dumps pesticides on the field.

1:02So it's very basic things that can save lives. And the worker protection standard is very important, although it's not anywhere as protective as it needs to be. And if you look at the inspection violation enforcement rate of the worker protection standard, it is abysmal. So I'm looking down here at the bottom row. The five-year average inspection rate is 1.2%. And that means of all the agricultural operations subject to the worker protection standard, only 1% are inspected every year. Of those 1% half are found to be in violation of the worker protection standard, you know, not offering their employees the protections that they need from pesticides. And of those, you know, that are found to be in violation only 20% received anything more than a warning. So, you know, if you're only inspecting 1% of facilities and half of those are in violation,

2:03imagine what that extrapolates out to. We have 1.8 million workers and handlers who are in these facilities. You know, that could potentially be a million people not getting federally mandated protections for pesticides. And if, you know, these agricultural operations only have a 20% chance of getting anything more than a slap on the wrist, what's the incentive to do the right thing? You know, so it's just, we're not doing enough and the laws we do have on, on the books aren't even being properly enforced. We export quite a few pesticides banned here to largely developing countries. This is a terrible practice. The European Union is in the process of stopping this practice. It too is a bad actor in this. But, you know, pesticides that we have deemed too dangerous to use within our own borders. We are fine with companies exporting those

3:04to mainly the global south. If you look at this bar graph here, the percent of nations receiving imports of pesticides of organic phosphate pesticides that we've banned in the US about 80% of them are low to middle income countries which you would expect, unfortunately. And about 72% have worker employees' names estimated to be higher than 30%. So we are exporting some of the most dangerous pesticides that we ourselves have said are too dangerous to use here. And we are sending them to these countries that are absolutely no regulatory infrastructure, absolutely no oversight, and it's killing people there. And it's leading to what is called the circle of poison where domestically the food here cannot use banned pesticides. But we export banned pesticides to other countries that are then using them on our food that we are importing from them.

4:06So we are still getting exposed to the pesticide even though we have bandits used here. There were efforts a decade ago to try and end this and the industry was just too strong and shot down all attempts to end this horrendously immoral practice. So hopefully we can get some wind behind our sales and get this practice banned like the European Union students. It's just absolutely horrendous. So moving forward, what does pesticide regulation in the U.S. look like? Unfortunately we're seeing some disturbing trends. I'm sure a lot of you have heard of PFAS, per and probably fluoral aqua substances. Agriculture chemicals are increasingly being PFASified if that is even a word. PFAS is basically highly fluorinated, chemical.

5:09When you think of PFAS, most people think of like PFOA which was the subject of the Moody Dark Waters by Mark Ruffalo a very good movie I recommend. Other ones like PFOS, PTFE is Teflon, you know the Teflon, the Cochapans, Jinx is a newer PFAS that is supposedly being used to replace PFOA and PFOS which can't be used here anymore. But the more we're learning about highly fluorinated chemicals, it's not just these really long chain PFAS that we need to be worried about, it's all of them. And so why are PFAS to worrisome? Well the carbon fluorine bond, which is a hallmark of many PFAS, it doesn't exist in nature, it's not a natural bond. So any carbon fluorine bond that is out in the environment was synthesized by people and released as pollution.

6:11And since it doesn't occur naturally, no biological processes have evolved to break it down. You know, sunlight doesn't break it down. Bacteria, fungi don't break it down. Heat doesn't break it down, it's just there. And there's no way really to get rid of it if it is dispersed across a large area of land. There's no reclamation process. So, you know, any PFAS pollution that is released today is going to be around for the birth of your grandchildren's grandchildren. And that is very, very worrisome. And the few PFAS that have been studied in any depth have been found to be incredibly, incredibly harmful to people. And the worrisome part and why I've included this in the talk is because pesticide ingredients are now PFAS, many of them are. If you look at, so this is the percentage of active ingredients. So that's the major component in the pesticide product.

7:13The percentage of ingredients that are either organic fluorine. So that means a chemical that has at least one carbon fluorine bond, but not necessarily a PFAS. And then if you look at active ingredients that are bona fide PFAS, that means they have at least one fully fluorinated carbon. If you look at all the approved pesticides, you know, we've got about 1200 or so in the US. About 20% are fluorinated to some extent. And about 15, almost 15% are straight up PFAS. 15% of active ingredients in pesticide products are PFAS themselves. And the trend is not good. If you look at the pesticides that have been approved in the last decade, 60% are fluorinated and nearly 30% are straight up PFAS. So the trend in the industry is to highly fluorinate your pesticide,

8:15highly fluorinate your pesticide chemical. And it is a terrible trend that I think is going to have lasting impacts. And this is just kind of an example of what that looks like. So this is broflanolid. This is approved a few years back. You can see the molecular makeup of this chemical. And it is highly fluorinated. You know, these Fs here are fluorines connected to carbons. So. And this is reflected in its persistence. So you look at the half-life in soil. Half-life is just how long it takes for one of the bonds in that chemical to break. It takes about six years, right? Half-life in water, about six years too. So we're looking at, you know, and that's just how long it takes for one of these bonds to break. And, you know, clock pretty much just starts over. So what we're looking at is over decades, this thing being slowly chewed up until you've got, you know, you're basically left with this little guy here, this benzene ring with a bunch of carbon fluorine bonds.

9:17And that's not going anywhere. That's going to have a half-life on par with DDT. So we're seeing trends in persistence that are absolutely backwards. I like to highlight this, this quote from a colleague of mine, Kyla Bennett. If the intent was to spread PFAS contamination across the globe, there would be few more effective ways of doing that than, than contaminating pesticides with PFAS. Just because of the extent that we use these chemicals and the hundreds of millions of acres of land that is treated every year. We did the calculations, there's between 23 to 35 million pounds of PFAS active ingredients that we use in the US each year. And we're not really monitoring what that means. What I mean by that is that there's only about 20% of the PFAS active ingredients have been actively monitored by the federal government in water.

10:21So we have about 66 PFAS active ingredients that are approved to be used in this country. Some are widely used, others are not used that much at all. But only 13 of those have actually been monitored in waterways across the country by the US geological survey. And of those 13, 12 have been found. Some are widespread water contaminants, pop up here and there. But if you're finding 12 out of 13 and you're only monitoring for 20% of those of those pesticides, that's a problem. And the worry here is that we're missing so much. And once we get around to understanding the full scope of the problem in my pt late. And so, you know, if the 60s and 70s were the age of the organo chlorine, which things like DDT, Aldrin, Claude and these things that stick around forever, we're still dealing with the impacts of DDT even though it was banned like 50 years ago.

11:25Even in the age of the organo fluorine, it's not just pesticides. It's really a lot of sense that synthetic chemicals are going this route and the legacy impacts. We're still trying to grapple with and probably won't be fully understood for many generations from now. So the takeaway here is, is pesticide regulation, the US is broken. And we started out really strong and we backslid ever since. And that's not the direction we needed to going. Not everyone is sharing, you know, their share, I guess, if you want to call it that, of the burden. Some people are getting hit really hard, others not so much. So it's, everyone's getting impacted to some extent. But the extent of our impacts are very different. And then, you know, I think we're really coming full circle. The 60s and 70s, when it comes to persistent pesticides.

12:25And that's, you know, that's something that, that should keep us all up at night. So with that brought over to you, I want to really focus in on accuracy. And before you fall asleep, I want to let you know that, that, you know, this story's got everything. It's like a made for Netflix movie. Music