Journal of Environment and Health Science | 2017-05-01

Evaluation of U.S. Pesticide Residential Soil Regulatory Guidance Values

Zijian Li

Abstract

To specify the maximum allowable pesticide concentration in soil, pesticide residential soil regulatory guidance values (RGVs) have been promulgated by many worldwide regulatory jurisdictions to protect human health. For example, a total of 12,451 RGVs for 456 identified pesticides have been adopted by 46 states in the U.S. Among them, 62 pesticides with at least 50 RGVs were defined as the commonly regulated pesticides. The RGVs for an individual pesticide could vary in a wide range of seven, eight, or even nine orders of magnitude. In this study, cancer and non-cancer risk uncertainty bounds were calculated for the seven most commonly regulated pesticides. Results indicate that some RGVs exceeded the upper bound of risk uncertainty and cannot protect human heath when exposing to the pesticides from the residential soil.

Keywords: Pesticides, environmental regulatory jurisdictions, pesticide standard, exposure pathways, human health risk model, the Stockholm Convention POPs