Armando Canela, CJ Moore, Ashlesha Moharana

Atrazine Solution (Final Paper)

April 23, 2015

Banning Atrazine

Many people in the world believe that in order to get rid of a national problem that you

can simply just ban it; usually with little or no reason to back up your decision, but not in our

case. My group and I have decided to ultimately ban the use of Atrazine in the United States for

the well-being of both the environment and the American people. What makes us different from

everyone else is that we have reasons to back up our decision and the use of previous “banning

cases” to our advantage in order to take necessary steps for this banning to successfully occur. In

this paper, we will talk about the banning of DDT in 1972 that occurred here in the United States

and the banning of Atrazine that occurred in the European Union in 2003 and see how they got

the pesticides banned. We will then later talk about the steps we will mimic and what

stakeholder’s would be affected from our decisions.

DDT was a commonly used pesticide in the United States following World War II and

was banned in 1972 (Panna.org). It was mainly applied on corn fields, sugar cane fields, and

cotton fields as well (Wikipedia.com). The way how this pesticide started to undergo the process

of it being banned was that a scientist named Rachel Carson did research on DDT and discovered

harmful health effects and highlighted them in a book she wrote, called Silent Spring

(Panna.org). Some of the harmful effects it has on humans at very low exposures are breast and

other cancers, male infertility, miscarriages, developmental delay, and nervous system and liver

damage (Panna.org). She spoke about all of these effects and increased awareness to people as
well as the congress (Panna.org). With this book and her testimony to congress about the harmful

effects, it jump started the organization of the Environmental Protection Agency (Panna.org).

They had also discovered that DDT was linked to the decline of Bald Eagles in America;

thinning the eagle’s eggshell and lowering the reproduction of the birds (Panna.org). The first job

EPA had done was ban the use of DDT, all thanks to Rachel Carson. She spread awareness to all

different kinds of people, even those that had power in the country. Another more recent and

relevant banning that occurred in our lifetime is the banning of Atrazine in the European Union.

Atrazine, it is a pesticide created by a company called, Syngenta Crop Protection, that

was originally based in Switzerland. Two countries that began banning the use of Atrazine were

both Italy and Germany in 1991 for numerous of harmful reason (Toxipedia.org). It negatively

impacts the environment and human life as we know it. On October 2003, the European Union

agreed to completely ban the use of Atrazine because they had sufficient evidence that there

were high concentration of atrazine in water bodies and drinking water, obviously passing the

legal limit, and more importantly, the public concern of its health effects to humans, which

scientists have discovered that Atrazine can cause cancer to humans and disrupt the endocrine

system of both humans and animals (CenterForHealthyHousing.org) (Toxipedia.org). The

endocrine system is the collection of glands in an organism that produces hormones that regulate

metabolism, growth/development, tissue function, reproduction (LiveScience.com). Scientists

from all around Europe came together to discover all of these health defects and harmful effects

Atrazine has in the environment and spread the word to the public which, sooner or later, ended

up being a continent-wide public concern (CenterForHealthyHousing.org). Scientists showed all

their evidence on Atrazine and the European Union had no other choice but to ban this pesticide

for the safety of their people (CenterForHealthyHousing.org). This is something that our group
wants to mimic so that the United States will do the same thing and completely ban the use of

Atrazine.
http://www.toxipedia.org/plugins/servlet/mobile#content/view/6005188

http://www.panna.org/issues/persistent-poisons/the-ddt-story

http://centerforhealthyhousing.org/Portals/0/Contents/Article0565.pdf

http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/chemicals/terbuthylazine.pdf

http://www.livescience.com/26496-endocrine-system.html