A pesticide banned by the EU for use as a "plant protection product", due to its health and environmental effects, is still available in some Irish hardware shops. Iva Pocock reports
Two products containing the illegal substance, lindane, were recently purchased in Dublin hardware shops by The Irish Times. Both are classified for amateur use - one is designed for burning "as a glasshouse smoke treatment" and the other is for eradicating pests by dusting on crops and other plants.
The State's Pesticide Control Service (PCS) confirmed both products are illegal - they were banned three years ago for such purposes - and requested details of the shops so that their inspectors could "take the necessary action to ensure that these products are taken off the market".
When asked about the ongoing availability of these products the Department of Health said the illegal sale of such products was a matter for the PCS.
One of the organochlorine group of chemicals, which seldom occurs naturally, lindane is carcinogenic and highly persistent. Because it is fat-soluble it accumulates in animal fatty tissue and then concentrates millions of times up the food chain, so that predators such as humans end up with much higher concentrations of the chemical than those in food or water. Lindane was in the past widely used in forestry developments.
Besides its agricultural uses as a seed dressing, lindane was used in wood and timber protection, and as a household insecticide.
Despite the pesticide's link to cancer, the EU ban is only partial and does not apply to pesticides classified as "biocides" rather than "plant protection products".
In Ireland it is not possible for consumers to check whether any lindane-based biocides are available because a register of authorised biocides has not yet been compiled by the PCS, despite EU requirements that it should be in place by 2003. Biocides are pesticides used for anything other than protecting plants.
However, the PCS said it "is not aware of any biocide containing lindane being sold on the Irish market at present" and that the only lindane product legally available in Ireland is a veterinary hygiene product.
In Denmark consumers have not been able to buy any lindane products for years. "It's banned as a plant protection product and even though it isn't legally banned as a biocide, we have a de-facto ban," explained Ms Inge Kraul, a toxicologist with the biocides division of the Danish Environmental Protection Agency. "This is because it's persistent and it bioaccumulates."
Until recent cutbacks, the Danish EPA operated a public Chemicals Hotline. Now queries are put straight through to the relevant section of the EPA. In Ireland queries about pesticides use can be addressed to the PCS, although a spokesman for the service explained that providing information to the public, other than publishing an annual report, is not its role.
None of the 13 garden centre shoppers interviewed by The Irish Times regarding their knowledge of pesticides considered that there is enough information available to them. None of those questioned could name an active substance (the compound which actually does the work of the pesticide product) unprompted. The names paraquat, simazine and DDT were familiar to some and one woman had heard of lindane, but only because it featured as a means of destroying a Russian wheat crop in a Frederick Forsyth novel.
The EPA has produced information about pesticides for the public. In 2000 it published Best Environmental Practice (BEP) guidelines for the use of 23 dangerous substances including six pesticides. The guidelines are available on its website.
The BEP advice for using the herbicide simazine, for example, which is persistent in ground-water, is more stringent than instructions given on products containing simazine. The guidelines include not applying simazine "in the vicinity of public and private supply boreholes and watercourses", while product information simply advises to "avoid treating in waterlogged conditions".
In addition to the difficulties in finding information, the safe disposal of old stocks of pesticides is a big problem, according to the PCS, because all pesticides are classified as hazardous waste and therefore they should be exported given the lack of a national public hazardous waste facility. This creates a cost factor which is a burden for commercial outlets, but possibly prohibitive for individual gardeners.
Not that the public is aware of the need to treat old pesticides with any particular caution, judging by responses of those interviewed by The Irish Times. It is likely that "amateur" pesticide users either store old products for years or otherwise, as one shopper said, "put them in the bin, same as everything". One garden centre manager admitted to still having a large can of the highly toxic pesticide DDT in his shed, though it was banned in the 1980s, which is hardly surprising given the lack of information about pesticides and lack of facilities for their disposal.