21 February 2025, San Francisco: Conservation groups and family farmers asked a federal court to force the Environmental Protection Agency to take long-overdue action to ensure that the highly controversial and dangerous herbicide atrazine does not continue to pollute the nation’s waters, harming people, wildlife and plants.
For more than three years the Biden administration slow-walked its court-mandated review of the safeguards necessary to protect wildlife from this dangerous chemical. Now the task of putting a plan in place to aggressively minimize or eliminate atrazine’s harm falls to the Trump administration.
Atrazine, which is banned in 60 countries, is the second most widely used herbicide in the United States and one of most widespread pesticide contaminants of the nation’s water. It is a known hormone-disruptor and exposure is linked to birth defects, multiple cancers, and fertility problems like low sperm quality and irregular menstrual cycles.
“Nothing short of a complete ban on atrazine will end the harm this extraordinarily dangerous pesticide is doing to human health and the thousands of waterways it has poisoned,” said Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The Trump administration has the opportunity, right now, to undo decades of cowardly inaction on atrazine and create a sweeping, signature achievement for everyone’s health by banning this nasty stuff.”
Since his election President Trump has criticized the “industrial food complex” and agribusiness and pledged that his administration will ensure that everyone is protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants and pesticides. He promised that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin would deliver “the cleanest air and water on the planet.”
“Atrazine is not necessary to grow healthy food or help farmers, making its continued use and the delay of judicial review of its unlawful approval all the more infuriating,” said George Kimbrell, Center for Food Safety’s legal director and counsel in the case. “Nearly 90% of atrazine is used on field corn that people don’t eat, to prop up confined animal feeding operations, and for nonagricultural uses.”
In January the Center sent a comprehensive analysis to the Trump administration detailing how a Biden-era plan would greenlight extremely harmful levels of atrazine pollution in 99% of the nation’s 11,249 contaminated watersheds. That EPA proposal is currently open for public comment until April 4.
The Center analysis of data from the EPA, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the pesticide industry found that the Biden proposal would allow harmful levels of atrazine in more than 11,000 U.S. watersheds, which encompass about one-eighth of the entire landmass of the continental United States: roughly 250 million acres.
The analysis found that the plan is predicted to permit dangerous levels of the pesticide in roughly 95% of contaminated waterways in Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, many of which drain into the Chesapeake Bay.
The greatest pollution from atrazine runoff is in the Midwest, including Illinois, where 88% of all watersheds are predicted to contain harmful levels of the pesticide, and Iowa, where 84% of watersheds are predicted to be polluted with harmful atrazine levels. The Biden plan would recover less than 1% of those contaminated watersheds to levels that meet their new and controversial atrazine water-quality threshold of 9.7 parts per billion. Lakes, rivers and streams in these watersheds provide drinking water for millions of Americans.
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