Use of herbicide linked to Parkinson's is on the rise in the US
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What is paraquat and why is it controversial?
Hey, it's Flora, and you are listening to Science Friday. Paraquat is a herbicide widely used in agriculture. It's toxic, it's been linked to Parkinson's, and it's been banned in over 70 countries. But not here. In fact, its use here is on the rise. One of the plants in the U.S.
How is paraquat being used and where is it produced?
that processes paraquat is in Wayne County in southeastern Mississippi. And according to a startling piece of reporting from my next guest, the plant is leaking large amounts of paraquat into the air. Here to tell us more is environmental reporter Delaney Nolan, who reported this story for The Lens and the Mississippi River Basin Ag and Water Desk. Delaney, thanks for being here.
Thanks so much for having me. I love Science Friday.
Oh, thanks. Take us to this plant in Mississippi. Where is it? What does it do?
Yeah, this is a plant in Waynesboro, Mississippi, which is a small, quite rural town. And at this plant, they formulate and repackage paraquat. So paraquat is this cheap, super toxic, what they call burndown agent herbicide. So we don't make paraquat in the Now it is mostly made in China or the UK and it's imported to the US. Where it's banned, right? Where it's banned. It's banned in China. It's banned in the UK.
What are the environmental impacts of paraquat emissions?
It's banned in the EU. It's banned in Brazil. It's banned in more than 70 countries because it is, again, so, so poisonous. So what is the plant doing exactly? Right. So they take this chemical, paraquat, and they add some other little chemicals and additives, and then they repackage it. They are turning it into a product that then gets distributed and sold to farmers.
So what did you find in terms of emissions?
Yeah, so Paraquad is not technically considered an air pollutant. So it's not something like ozone that's regulated by the federal government and says, hey, if your facility emits over a certain amount of this, you have to get a permit. Instead, Paraquat's a toxic chemical. That means it's regulated by something called the Toxics Release Inventory, which basically is this publicly available database where a little over 600 different toxic chemicals are tracked just to keep people informed. So it's not saying how much you're allowed to release, but a community can look up what's around them and what chemicals are being released in the air. So I was able to see all the releases of Paraquat that have been reported in the last about 10 years.
And this facility in Waynesboro, Mississippi, is way out above the rest and the amounts that it is emitting. So I'll give you a little bit of comparison. If you're a farmer and you want to treat an acre of your farm, you'll use about a pound of paraquat. Other places that handle paraquat, they have released between like one and five pounds of paraquat into the air in the last five years. The Waynesboro facility in 2024 released 47,000 pounds of paraquat into the air. That is a crazy amount of paraquat that is being released into the air as a fugitive emission.
A fugitive emission. So it's not coming out of a smokestack. It's leaking. But why? Why is it leaking so much Paraquat?
We don't have more information about that, unfortunately. I reached out to the company, which is called Sipcam Agro, as well as the plant manager, to try to learn a little bit more about why so much of this Paraquat was going into the air. But all we can see is that these are reported as fugitive emissions, which generally means that it's not a deliberate part of the process that's coming out of a smokestack. And it's an estimate as well. So this is probably based on some information they have about the repackaging process. But the actual numbers could be higher or lower. Is it legal, Delaney? It is legal. Yeah. What they're doing is absolutely legal because, again, this is not an air pollutant that's regulated by the federal government.
They have to report it. And the state, so in this case, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, they have purview to regulate or set maximum thresholds. But generally, states aren't doing that.
We know Paraquat has been linked to Parkinson's.
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