Pollution from Midwest Farms: Atrazine and Nitrogen

Sixteen Midwestern towns have sued Syngenta, the manufacturer of the herbicide atrazine, over drinking water contamination. Atrazine is the most common weedkiller used in US Agriculture. The lawsuit was filed by towns in Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, and Iowa. The EU banned atrazine in 2004, but US farmers spray about 80 million pounds per year. Studies have linked atrazine to frog hermaphoditism.

There is a write-up of the suit at the Huffington Post Investigative Fund.

Last fall, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced it was reopening investigations of safety risks associated with atrazine. Here is the EPA’s atrazine site:

http://www.epa.gov/opp00001/reregistration/atrazine/

The Natural Resources Defense Council  (NRDC) has released a blistering report calling out the EPA for refusing to regulate atrazine. It uses data that the EPA collected, but didn’t previously release. The data includes examples of to atrazine pollution reaching tap water, oftentimes exceeding the EPA’s 3ppb limit for atrazine in drinking water.

The NRDC report is posted on this website. The report itself is here.

From the Huffington Post Investigative Fund:

One of the nation’s most widely-used herbicides has been found to exceed federal safety limits in drinking water in four states, but water customers have not been told and the Environmental Protection Agency has not published the results.

HuffPost has also produced a video to give more background on the story of atrazine, entitled “How Safe Is Atrazine?”

Apparently legislation has passed that bans the use of Atrazine for parts of Wisconsin.