Pesticide breakdown products found in hundreds of US streams

river waterFrom the American Chemical Society, March 23, 2021.

When toxic pesticides break down in the environment, the threat they may pose to aquatic life does not simply disappear—instead, they spawn a deluge of derivatives known as transformation products, which can be just as toxic as their parent molecules.

An extensive environmental survey of pesticide transformation products has now shown that these derivatives are almost ubiquitous in small streams across the US and could be contributing a lot more to the overall toxic burden of some pesticides than researchers previously thought (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2021, DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.0c06625).

Read the article.

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