Tag Archives: pollution

Netherlands publishes atlas for pesticides in groundwater

The Netherlands has recently published a new Groundwater Atlas for Pesticides, which will be used by the Board for the Authorisation of Plant Protection Products and Biocides (Ctgb) to monitor groundwater quality.

The Groundwater Atlas was developed between 2015 and 2016 and commissioned by the ministries of Economic Affairs and Infrastructure and the Environment. Other organisations which have been involved more recently include Wageningen Environmental Research (Alterra) and the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), who have coordinated the data provided by the water companies. Alterra was responsible for monitoring the quality and consistency of all of the data in the atlas.

In the Netherlands, groundwater is sampled from thousands of sites and tested by the provinces and by water companies. This first version of the Groundwater Atlas uses a list of active ingredients and metabolites of plant protection products and biocides and uses the same system of product identification used for plant protection product approval in the Netherlands.

Photo Credit: Wageningen University & Research

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WIYBY will advise on water pollution risk

The Voluntary Initiative (VI) is calling on farmers and growers to use the Environment Agency’s What’s in Your Backyard website (www.wiyby.co.uk) to help assess the risk of water pollution from agrochemicals and manage key products appropriately.

‘Farmers, agronomists and operators need to know where their land drains to, if they want to continue to use pesticides to control weeds and slugs,’ said the VI in a statement. Although primarily targeted at winter cereals and oilseed rape, the use of metaldehyde for slug control has implications for vegetable growers.

“Not every field drains to a drinking water source but pesticide use in those that do really matters,” explained the VI’s Patrick Goldsworthy. “The first step for farmers and growers is to find out whether any of the land they manage is in a Drinking Water Safeguard Zone and if there are any pesticide issues in that Safeguard Zone. [If] there are concerns about pesticide issues then they should discuss with their agronomist what they can do to help reduce the risk of any pesticides they use reaching water, be that surface or ground water.”

For more information visit www.voluntaryinitiative.org.uk.

The post WIYBY will advise on water pollution risk appeared first on Hort News on 24 November 2015.