EPA Floats New Spray Drift Risk Model, Prompting Competing Criticisms

摘要

EPA's new draft spray drift model, intended to address concerns that existing pesticide assessments do not consider spray drift as an exposure pathway, is being widely criticized, with industry groups protesting overly conservative assumptions and environmentalists arguing that the model is not sufficiently rigorous, according to recent comments. Among the most frequent commenters are commercial crop dusters, whose activities could be severely restricted as EPA's draft spray drift policy suggested that wide no-spray buffers or bans on aerial pesticide applications might be necessary to eliminate drift from some of the sector's applications.