WASHINGTON— The Environmental Protection Agency announced today that it is considering granting “emergency” approval for a PFAS pesticide, meaning it will not have to undergo important safety reviews required as part of the normal pesticide approval process.

Since President Trump took office the agency has approved two PFAS pesticides and proposed approving three more through the normal non-emergency review process.

“As if we didn’t have enough dangerous pesticides in our food, now the Trump EPA is considering a backdoor approval to dump more poison onto our rice without conducting an adequate safety review,” said Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We need to turn off the tap to new PFAS chemicals, not find quicker ways to expedite their release into our food, waterways and bodies.”

The requests by the Arkansas and Missouri departments of agriculture would allow up to 43,399 gallons of products containing the pesticide tetflupyrolimet to be used on up to 646,000 acres of rice crops from March 1 to July 1.

PFAS stands for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly called “forever chemicals.” While some PFAS differ in their toxicities, their potential to bioaccumulate and their potential to pollute water, all PFAS are highly persistent and have chemical bonds that will essentially never break down. PFAS ingredients in pesticide products have been found to contaminate streams and rivers throughout the country.

Tetflupyrolimet is considered “[v]ery toxic to aquatic life with long lasting effects,” according to the United Nations Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals, which requires a pictogram of a dead tree and fish on labels containing the product. Notably, rice crops are often grown in standing water, making the potential for water contamination very high, if not inevitable.

Tetflupyrolimet can break down into a smaller forever chemical called trifluoroacetic acid, or TFA, which is thought to be one of the most pervasive PFAS water contaminants in the world. TFA comes from many sources in the environment, but recent research has highlighted the significant role pesticides play in water contamination throughout the world. Researchers believe we are exceeding what’s known as a “planetary boundary threat” with TFA, where societal health harms may be irreversible

Tetflupyrolimet has the same mode of action as some medical drugs designed to target human pathogens, raising the possibility that it could play a role in increasing drug resistance to lifesaving human medicines. But the EPA has not yet conducted a full analysis of how the pesticide impacts people.

Since tetflupyrolimet is currently not approved for U.S. use, the EPA is legally required to take public comment on the impending emergency approval decision. The “emergency” cited is that barnyard grass, considered a weed in rice crops, has become resistant to myriad other pesticides commonly used on rice, which spurred the request for approval of yet another pesticide in a never-ending treadmill of poisons.

The EPA has routinely allowed emergency exemptions for predictable and chronic situations that occur over many consecutive years. The agency has consistently abused the authority of granting emergency exemptions, as chronicled in the Center’s report, Poisonous Process: How the EPA’s Chronic Misuse of ‘Emergency’ Pesticide Exemptions Increases Risks to Wildlife.

In 2019 the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General released a report finding that the agency’s practice of routinely granting “emergency” approval for pesticides across millions of acres does not effectively measure risks to human health or the environment.

The EPA has stated in press materials that many new fluorinated pesticides do not meet the EPA chemicals office “regulatory” PFAS definition.

But the pesticides do meet the widely accepted Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development PFAS definition that was developed transparently by dozens of scientists around the world. That definition has subsequently been endorsed by more than 150 leading PFAS researchers, is used by nearly every U.S. state for regulating PFAS, and was specifically written into past versions of the National Defense Authorization Act.

Using the scientific definition of a PFAS that is widely accepted here and around the world, these pesticides are PFAS.

The EPA initially acknowledged on its fluorinated pesticides webpage that these pesticides met the widely accepted PFAS definition. Yet three weeks after creating the webpage it removed any mention of that definition, opting instead to highlight the agency’s unilateral definition of what constitutes a PFAS.

The Center has submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to uncover what led to this change.

The EPA has also stated that its PFAS definition specifically excluded chemicals that had a single fully fluorinated carbon because, the agency asserted, they do not display the persistence properties commonly associated with forever chemicals. The EPA’s final rule for its PFAS definition cites a single study to support this assertion. However, the only instance where this study mentions the lack of persistence of chemicals with one fully fluorinated carbon is when it directly quotes the EPA’s response to a petition from communities seeking greater PFAS oversight by the EPA. Therefore, the agency is essentially citing its own position as evidence to support its position.

Many fluorinated chemicals that meet the widely accepted science-based PFAS definition, but do not meet the EPA’s PFAS definition, are incredibly persistent. To name just a few, carbon tetrafluoride has an atmospheric half-life of 50,000 years and TFA is thought to have an aqueous half-life of several hundreds of years and is considered a legacy pollutant.

Chemicals with single fully fluorinated carbons can stick around for generations or longer, which was the basis for their inclusion in the widely accepted PFAS definition. Most PFAS pesticides are expected to eventually degrade into the forever chemical TFA over a span of months to decades depending on the chemical properties of the individual pesticide.