Worker Safety Issues Top List of Violations of State Pesticide Laws

It could have been spectacular. The FBI was digging for what it believed could be as many as 7,000 used pesticide containers. If true, the cattle feedlot near Agri-Empire’s San Jacinto headquarters would have been far and away the largest illegal pesticide-container dump in the history of the state.

By those standards, the actual find of a dozen or so containers--in ground that Agri-Empire says is not tainted--is minuscule. Yet the Agri-Empire feedlot is still an unusual site.

In California, violations of laws regarding the storage and disposal of leftover agricultural pesticides and used containers are relatively uncommon. While they attract lots of attention--because of consumer fears of pollution and food safety--such violations make up less than 8% of all pesticide-law infractions cited by the state’s pesticide-law enforcement agency.

By far the most common violations of the state’s pesticide regulations involve worker safety issues, which range from application practices and protective clothing to training and record keeping. Those make up nearly 37% of all violations cited by the state Department of Pesticide Regulation, a unit of the California Environmental Protection Agency.

There are not a lot of toxic dump sites on farms in the state, said James W. Wells, director of the pesticide regulation department. “For the most part, farmers try to use up all their pesticides,” he said. “They don’t generate waste . . . and once they triple-rinse the containers, they are not hazardous waste any more.”

Rather, according to Wells, “there are more industrial or manufacturing wastes” and toxic dumps of industrial chemicals--some of them the same compounds used by farmers.

Wells said that in nearly nine years that he worked in the field, “we ran across a place where somebody had dumped out a bunch of containers on a back road once in a while, but not often.

“One incident sticks out in my mind--a local farm supply outfit that had sold out . . . and dumped 12 to 15 empty, five-gallon containers along a stream,” Wells said. “It was one of the most blatant dumps, and most unusual.”

Problems with agricultural pesticides attract more attention than those involving toxic industrial chemicals because “they have high visibility and there’s a big fear factor,” he said.

State laws regulate pesticides each step along the way from labeling and transportation to the farm, through storage, application and finally, disposal. Pesticide containers must be stored in a posted and locked enclosure. After use, most pesticide containers must be triple-rinsed and then can be disposed of only at dump sites licensed to accept them.

Dump sites throughout the state have been filling up, and, until this year, disposal of even legal pesticide containers could sometimes have been very expensive; if farmers had containers of leftover banned pesticides, disposal could be nearly impossible and as costly as $1,500 per load--even if only one container was being dumped or incinerated.

However, this year, new regulations have allowed each county to collect and dispose of pesticide containers, making it far less expensive for the farmers. Some counties have joined with manufacturers in recycling programs to further reduce the number of containers going to dumps.

Douglas Y. Okumura, chief of Cal-EPA’s pesticide enforcement branch, said the new law has been successful in collecting old chemicals and containers. For the most part, he said, farmers “all honestly try to get rid of (used pesticide containers) in appropriate places, but there are fewer and fewer places.”

Worker safety concerns are the No. 1 priority for the enforcement agency now. Even with the close enforcement, farmers do not have a bad record. While the state’s numbers do not reflect the severity of violations, they show that in 40,000 inspections from June, 1990, to July, 1991, there were 544 citations.

California farmers say the cost of complying with the state’s pesticide regulations have put them at a competitive disadvantage nationally. That disadvantage will diminish over the next two years, however, as the federal government fully implements its new, tighter worker-safety regulations.

California farmers will have to make a few minor adjustments, said Cal-EPA’s Wells. “Most of our standards are stricter and we intend to keep them that way,” he said.

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