RESIDENTIAL URBAN SPRAYING IN NEW ZEALAND - EVIDENCE FOR SAFETY? (2023)

Is urban herbicide spraying for weed control safe - as claimed by the NZ EPA?

Elected members, after formal presentations from the public that urban herbicides spraying presents a health risk to the public, are assured by council staff that urban herbicide sprays are safe. Who is correct?

It's confusing. Yes, the New Zealand Environmental Protection Authority (NZ EPA) is the 'authority', but they're not doing the work to demonstrate that urban sprays are safe. It's difficult to trust the assurances of a regulatory agency that fails to undertake scientifically-relevant risk assessment - for years.

Over the years, PSGR have supported residents and councillors in the evaluation of new information that continues to be ignored and dismissed by the NZ EPA, with presentations to councils around New Zealand. We've now put together a publicly available presentation to highlight why persistent claims by the NZ EPA - that the herbicides are safe if they are used as per the instructions on the label - lack basis.

- We have a video presentation which helps explain the current issues.

- We've produced a 2-page summary (PDF) of key information in the presentation.

We've also released a recommendation:

RECOMMENDATION BASED ON THE SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE OF SAFETY OF URBAN ROADSIDE & PUBLIC AREA SPRAYING, FOR VEGETATION MANAGEMENT IN NEW ZEALAND.

It is recommended that the spraying of herbicides cease in urban environments where it can be reasonably expected that children and vulnerable people will walk and play within two weeks of the spray having occurred.

It is recommended that a precautionary approach be taken to cease spraying, due to evidence of risk and a demonstrable absence of scientific evidence of safety:

International regulatory agencies: (a) recognise that the key herbicides (used in urban New Zealand) and their metabolites persist for weeks after spraying; and (b) children are at particular risk. Agencies (c) do not conduct risk assessment of herbicidal spraying in urban residential areas, there is no scientific proof of safety.

Responsible authorities and Ministries in New Zealand have failed to dedicate funding to research risk for residents in sprayed urban areas; nor has the EPA NZ have formally risk assessed the main herbicidal substances in use.

The video presentation can be found on YouTube and Odysee:

1. AFTER 30+ YEARS - WHERE IS EVIDENCE FOR SAFETY?

Councillors in regional and district councils, across New Zealand, are familiar with presentations from the public urging that the council stop spraying. Month after month. Year after year. Politicians and NGOs have launched campaigns increase awareness and pressure councils to cease spraying.

After Councillors/elected members are presented to by the concerned public, Councillors then meet with council staff who assure them that the NZ EPA are the authority on the matter.

However, the NZ EPA are failing to practice due diligence. They're not doing the necessary mahi to protect people and communities, which they are required, by law, to do.

The NZ EPA has never carried out an independent risk assessment of glyphosate formulations, and the adjuvant additives, to assess persistence and toxicity. Instead, NZ EPA simply carry out reauthorisations, and updates using industry supplied data. This has been their proxy for risk assessment for decades.

This is not good enough.

There is no evidence to support safety claims made by the New Zealand Environmental Protection Authority (NZ EPA) that herbicide applications to roadsides, parks, and around urban infrastructure, such as shops, schools and hospitals, where residents, including children regularly travel, are safe. The current claims of the NZ EPA are not balanced by - do not reflect - real world data. The NZ EPA has not reviewed scientific literature, court documents and available white papers. Epidemiological studies remain unconsidered.

The EPA effectively dismissed the international gold standard for cancer risk, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, who found that glyphosate probably causes cancer. They did this by carrying out an inhouse Review of the Evidence Relating to Glyphosate and Carcinogenicity, by retired toxicologist Wayne Temple. It lacked the transparency and thoroughness of the IARC processes. Instead, Temple resorted to unpublished private industry data. Temple ignored epidemiological evidence. In contrast, the IARC use a panel of expert scientists and look widely for evidence relating to cancer risk.

New Zealand public health scientists condemned the NZ EPA’s inaction on glyphosate in the NZMJ paper, Carcinogenicity of glyphosate: why is New Zealand’s EPA lost in the weeds? Slamming the NZ EPAs failure to acknowledge the finding that the gold standard on deciding cancer risk, and the NZ EPA's flawed processes.

Professor Jeroen Douwes and colleagues stated in their paper that:

NZEPA process for evaluating the carcinogenicity of glyphosate was flawed and the post hoc justification invalid: there is no mention of risk assessment or “net-benefit approach” in the NZEPA report; and there is no discussion of current New Zealand glyphosate exposures. Further, the NZEPA report quotes heavily from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) report, which is itself markedly flawed, and like the NZEPA report, relies heavily on industry-funded and industry-manipulated reviews. Given the scientific flaws in both reports we urge that: the NZEPA report be withdrawn; the NZEPA respond to the concerns raised and for a reassessment to be conducted; and clearer process and better understanding of science be used to inform any future review of hazardous substances in New Zealand.

The NZ EPA, with little or no epidemiological expertise, did not respond. These public health experts were ignored.

In addition, no monitoring has been undertaken despite some 3 decades of urban spraying. Yet as we discuss in our presentation, the herbicides, including glyphosate, used in urban spraying, persist for much longer than is claimed. Therefore, the NZ EPA cannot claim that residents and children travelling daily along those routes will not be exposed.

An absence of the NZ EPA taking action to make sure communities are safe - does not translate, at all, to being safe. In this absence, the NZ EPA cannot be respected as an authority on this matter. Therefore, the claims of the NZ EPA are not scientific, but based on formulaic representations, modelling scenarios and private industry data. [1]

According to principles of administrative law, the NZ EPA must not exclusively rely on industry data for evidence of safety.

‘The test for apparent bias reflects the standards of the fair-minded lay observer: would the lay observer, having been fully informed of the facts, reasonably suspect that the decision maker may have been biased?’ [2]

That is why, in the absence of guidance by the NZ EPA, PSGR has released the 2023 recommendation to assist communities, elected members and public sector staff.

2. GETTING THE FACTS STRAIGHT

It's not just the fact that the IARC was ignored. Despite the failure of the NZ EPA to address this issue, council staff still tell elected members herbicide spraying is safe if applied as used on the label. But the issue is much greater - if communities are to be protected.

When inconvenient new scientific information is ignored, and regulators stay locked in old toxicological frameworks based around private, unpublished industry studies - these studies are not really 'science' but a tool to maintain market access. If it is science, it should be able to be challenged and refuted. This is not the case, because the NZ EPA do not permit this.

In New Zealand there is no science supporting the safety of spraying glyphosate formulations, and the other co-applied ingredients, in public spaces. Despite spraying in urban areas for over 3 decades in New Zealand, no risk assessment has ever been carried out regarding the:

Active ingredients in the formulations and adjuvant additives.
Persistence in the environment – soil - of the formulations and adjuvant additives.
Accumulation potential of exposures to local residents, including children, regularly traversing the spaces that have been sprayed, in the days following spraying.
Toxicity of the mixture of the formulations and adjuvant additives.
Vulnerability to pregnant mothers, babies, and children to the formulations and adjuvant additives.
Potential for the active ingredients and metabolites to bioaccumulate in water and sediment.

Furthermore:

No scientific literature review has ever been undertaken by the NZ EPA to assess new knowledge on toxicity.
The NZ EPA will never ask public sector scientists to do monitoring of soil, water, air – or human sampling, to assess the persistence in the environment in the days following sprays.
There is no regulator anywhere in the world that has assessed the safety of the formulations and adjuvant additives to local communities, when sprayed in urban areas.
The NZ EPA has not established – from what we can assess – TELs, tolerable exposure limits; and EELs, environmental exposure limits, for exposures to pedestrians, including children, and the limits for spraying in public areas.

There is no evidence for safety after 3 decades of sprays.

The NZ EPA has failed to consider this risk, in effect the NZ EPA has fettered discretion. These are all common-sense and practical questions. What is the basis for the claims by the NZ EPA?

The claims of other, collegial, global regulators, who themselves never assess these formulations and adjuvant additives specifically for the use of spraying in public urban areas where local residents will be exposed.
The process of authorisation or amendment of approvals of the use of active ingredients using unpublished industry data. This data is produced and supplied by the corporations who have the financial conflict of interest, seeking market approval.

However, elected members and council staff may not realise that the New Zealand Environmental Protection Authority’s (NZ EPAs) claim that glyphosate formulations, and the other co-applied ingredients, does not have robust science supporting it.

Instead, there is a wide body of scientific and legal literature contradicting regulatory claims, and pointing to the extremely weak foundations that underpin claims of safety.

3. NZ EPA: NEVER CONVENED TO CONSIDER NEW INFORMATION

However, in the years since the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the gold standard for gauging cancer risk, declared that glyphosate probably causes cancer (a group 2A carcinogen), court discovery processes uncovered extensive and damning evidence that unfavourable information was not declared to regulators; not only has the NZ EPA not conducted a formal risk assessment –

The chief executive, ex-PG Wrightsons executive Alan Freeth, has the power to announce grounds for reassessment [s.62(1)].

Yet since 2015, he has never done so and a sub-committee has never been convened to consider whether significant new information has become available [s.62(2)].

The recent Call for Information on glyphosate, which PSGR responded to, was not required to justify risk assessment. The NZ EPA by carrying out this endeavour, were inferring that the Call for Information was a necessary precondition for risk assessment. But the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act 1996 (HSNO Act) suggests otherwise in section 62 (1) and (2). In fact, a Call for Information to precede risk assessment appears to be a new invention, inserted into the 2020 Risk Assessment Methodology. The NZ EPA's 2022 Risk Assessment Methodology for Hazardous Substances states:

When a reassessment of an existing substance is initiated, we seek comments from the public and industry, as part of a call for information, to better understand the benefits of that substance; the subsequent reassessment proposals are then publicly notified or consulted upon.

The Call for Information is a lower order guideline, while the HSNO Act is the authority.

There is an extensive range of data that has surfaced since 2015, but the NZ EPA has never convened the sub-committee to consider this information.

The NZ EPA does not need to put out a timely and expensive Call for Information. Instead, the NZ EPA could charge their own scientists to review practices quite simply, by contacting each industry sector (E.g. forestry, pastoral, cereals and arable, horticulture, Department of Conservation, NZTA, railways, territorial and local authority use), to assess, independently patterns of use, including tank mix formulations, extent of restrictions (such as time before harvest, before access is permitted, before stock graze on sprayed area) and extent of herbicide resistance across all use patterns. The NZ EPA could contact the Ministry of Health and regions for patterns on the cancer, non-Hodgkins's lymphoma identified as being probably caused by glyphosate.

This is much more scientific and impartial than asking the general public and industry for information, pitting the general public against a well-resourced corporate sector, and looking through hundreds of submissions.

The question is, why does the NZ EPA lack such initiative? Why doesn't Ministry for the Environment require the NZ EPA to do this work, which feasibly, would require similar resourcing to the Call for Information event?

As we discuss in our presentation, following the Call for Information, the NZ EPA released the Summary report on the Call for Information (May 2022). This did not analyse any science that was supplied, it does not judge the information. Therefore, the Summary repeats claimed advantages such as no withholding period for food crops is beneficial, that glyphosate helps with herbicide resistance, and that glyphosate has low human toxicity, in bold as section headers, whether these are scientifically correct or consistent with international practice. In addition, there is no evidence the scientific information supplied (which was largely ignored in the Summary document) would be used in a future risk assessment. The Summary document may have been predominantly a tool designed in order to push risk assessment out for another few years.

4. WHAT FORMULANT MIXTURE IS APPLIED?

When are herbicides sprayed down council streets, in parks, on routes to schools, around shopping centres, doctors’ surgeries, and around council ‘assets’ such as bus-stops and other amenities and infrastructure? And which herbicides are sprayed?

We can’t ever know too clearly, as there is never a sign up telling us on the site of spraying. Instead, councils place messages somewhere on their website, and expect the public to watch closely. This digital notification practice has no merit as the public should not be reasonably expected to watch a website on a daily basis.

The problem is not only the spraying by local councils. Waka Kotahi, the New Zealand Transport Agency, sprays roadsides on main routes, in towns and cities. There sprays are not declared on the site of spraying, either.

We suspect that the herbicidal mix is often composed of a glyphosate formulation, a metsulfuron-methyl formulation and an adjuvant such as pulse penetrant (active ingredient polyether modified polysiloxane).

For decades, pesticide contractors and councils have argued that it is infeasible that they place signs up when they are spraying wide areas. This is correct.

But it is infeasible that the public should be exposed to herbicide mixtures, where the national regulator, and the scientific community, have not independently considered the evidence on hazard and risk.

5. A PRECAUTIONARY APPROACH IS WARRANTED

Responsible authorities and Ministries (NZ) have failed to dedicate funding to research risk for residents in sprayed urban areas; nor has the EPA NZ have formally risk assessed the main herbicidal substances in use.

A regulator that fails to consider the available published scientific and legal information is not in a situation to claim that use of an herbicidal mixture in public spaces, where the public are exposed, is safe.

There is extensive evidence that the herbicides used in roadside sprays are harmful, and that they persist much longer than regulators claim. In the absence of regulatory action to monitor and conduct New Zealand based risk assessment, we can conclude that there is scientific and technical uncertainty about the effects of these herbicides on local communities who regularly traverse the sprayed areas in the days following application.

NZ EPA staff are unlikely to guide Councillors/elected members on a precautionary approach. Even though staff are required to by law to take a precautionary approach, with section 7 enshrined in law for nearly 3 decades, NZ EPA staff given no guidance on how to take a precautionary approach when carrying out their duties.

This need not prevent territorial and local authorities from taking a precautionary approach to cease herbicide applications along roadsides, in parks, and around urban infrastructure, such as shops, schools and hospitals, where residents, including children regularly travel.

6. ARE COUNCIL STAFF LOYALTIES & LACK OF RESOURCING, A BARRIER TO CHANGE?

Council staff advise the elected members that the pesticide sprays are safe if they are used as per the label.

Council staff then advise councillors that the cost of shifting to non-chemical vegetation management would be prohibitive. Councillors then frequently defer to staff recommendations to either not shift away from chemical vegetation management, or make slight alterations, such as stopping sprays around playgrounds.

Barriers to transition include structural and informational barriers. The perceived cost of non-chemical management; lack of information at hand; the discomfort of learning, trialling and changing; experience of complaints from the public if previously neat vegetation areas shift to being less tightly managed; and the reluctance to 'let go' of existing contractors (who might be reluctant to change operating strategy) - all produce resistance to transition.

All organisations have informational and supplier networks. Council staff have relationships with existing contractors, the NZ EPA and the chemical company suppliers, whereas council staff are not widely networked with non-chemical contractors, nor scientists or experts with resourcing. Council staff need support and resourcing to transition to non-chemical modalities.

There is extensive evidence that urban environments can be managed affordably without the use of chemical sprays. Several Auckland regions have managed vegetation on a chemical-free basis for decades. Councils can contract experts in non-chemical vegetation management, such as Dr Charles Merfield, or through the Auckland-based Weed Management Advisory who has contacts with contractors with chemical-free expertise. These experts can be retained on an advisory basis to assist councils and contractors with this transition.

There is evidence that real cost of non-chemical management have been hidden due to secrecy provisions. Large contractors can sub-contract spray-free contractors, but that the larger contractors add margins to the quote, the claimed cost of supplying non-chemical services. There is also evidence that large contractors are reluctant to move away from the convenience of chemical applications, and that their ignorance around management regimes may be a barrier to change.

Change requires changing the rules of the game so that the 'chemical crutch' isn't the default. This means stopping the practice of hiding prices for sub-contracts inside bigger contract quotes. It means encouraging smaller operators to quote, and learning as they go from other experts. It also means educating the public that it is not necessary to have perfect neat assets. Communications and PR departments are able to take on this work. As herbicide resistance is a growing problem, it's time to shift away from chemical vegetation management.

Council staff may be reluctant to disclose these issues, and that they have insufficient resources to demand and oversee such a strategy, and that such a strategy will be successful over the longer term.

Long-term plans require councils to strategically consider the long term in order to steward territorial and local authorities into the future. As with much of council work, changing to non-chemical management is a long-term strategy, and can never be a short-term quick fix.

REFERENCES

[1] Risk Assessment Methodology for Hazardous Substances How to assess the risk, cost, and benefit of new hazardous substances for use in New Zealand December 2022. https://www.epa.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/Documents/Hazardous-Substances/Risk-Assessment-methodology/Risk-Assessment-Methodology-for-Hazardous-Substances-How-to-assess-the-risk-cost-and-benefit-of-new-hazardous-substances-for-use-in-New-Zealand-Updated-December-2022.pdf

[2] Constitutional and Administrative Law in New Zealand, P.A. Joseph 4th Ed. 2014 25.5.1 P.1076

Boedeker et al 2020. The global distribution of acute unintentional pesticide poisoning: estimations based on a systematic review. BMC Public Health 20:1875

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