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How Pesticides Endanger Pregnant Farmworkers in Pajaro Valley
Santa Cruz County’s $1.5 billion agriculture industry relies on more than one million pounds of pesticides annually to help boost crop yields. Farmworkers, who apply pesticides and pick produce, carry the heaviest health risks from pesticide exposure — and workers who are pregnant can expose their children to a lifetime of health problems.
California pesticide regulations are too lax to keep farmworkers safe, activists said, and sometimes workers are exposed to even higher levels of the chemicals. Santa Cruz Local spoke with half a dozen farmworkers who described experiences where pesticides were sprayed so close to them that the smell was overwhelming and the fumes burned their eyes, lips and throat.
In part due to the risks pesticides pose, farmworkers are eligible to stop work on the first day of pregnancy and collect state disability insurance payments that they have paid into — regardless of immigration status. But barriers to access the payments persist, including language access challenges, a lack of money to cover the delay to the first payment, immigration enforcement fears and a lack of awareness of the system.
Most women also don’t know they are pregnant until several weeks into pregnancy.
Trump Wants to Kill a Chemical Safety Board. Chemical Makers Object.
The White House is planning to eliminate the board, a small agency that investigates chemical disasters to understand what went wrong. In January 2021, after a nitrogen leak at a poultry plant in Georgia killed six workers and injured scores more, federal investigators arrived at the scene.
The team, from a small federal agency called the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, traced the fatal leak to a freezer part that had been bent out of shape. A series of recommendations to improve safety followed. Now, the White House is planning to eliminate the agency, allocating $0 for its budget starting in 2026. Even industry groups are opposed.
The board has a reputation for working collaboratively with companies, said Shakeel H. Kadri, executive director of the Center for Chemical Process Safety, an industry-funded organization that works on safety issues, adding that it also doesn’t penalize companies or issue new regulations.
“It has a unique mandate to do independent investigations,” Mr. Kadri said, that’s invaluable particularly at small- and medium-sized companies, where a lot of chemical accidents tend to happen but also where companies have fewer resources to investigate root causes themselves. The board’s findings are also used in other countries and in academia, he said.
Tire Particles Flood Freshwater With Toxic Microplastics
A new review pulls together decades of research on tire wear particles (TWPs) — the tiny bits that break off tires and get washed away. It turns out wind and rain can sweep huge amounts of these fragments off highways and straight into nearby streams and ponds.
In heavy-traffic zones, TWPs can make up 50 to 90 percent of all microplastics that run off roads during rainfall. When soils are included, nearly 45 percent of microplastics found on land or in freshwater environments can be traced to tire abrasion.
Concentrations recorded in field samples vary wildly — from just 0.00001 mg per liter to an astonishing 10,000 mg per liter. These extremes highlight the presence of localized hotspots.
The City Contaminating Almost 900,000 North Carolinians’ Drinking Water
Southern Environmental Law Center reported:
In North Carolina’s Chatham County, the beloved Haw and Deep Rivers converge to form the Cape Fear, the basin that people from Pittsboro to Wilmington rely on for their drinking water.
For years, many North Carolinians consumed that water unaware that polluters, including the city of Asheboro and plastics company StarPet, Inc., had been contaminating their drinking supply with 1,4-dioxane — a clear, odorless, industrial chemical linked to cancer and organ damage that can’t be removed by conventional water treatment.
“A lot of people had already raised their kids on that water,” says Jean Zhuang, senior attorney with SELC. For families affected by 1,4-dioxane in North Carolina, the pollution has led to difficult and costly decisions: installing expensive water tanks, pulling their children out of daycares that lacked proper water treatment, avoiding the creeks and rivers where they’d otherwise fish and play, and, in some cases, even uprooting their lives entirely to move.
Postcard From California: Plastics ‘Recycling’ — out of Sight, out of Mind
Last year California shipped more than 156 million pounds of plastic waste to poor countries, with almost three-fourths sent to Mexico and another 44 million pounds sent to developing nations in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
That’s the reality behind the blue recycling bins Californians fill with plastic waste for curbside pickup. We may think we’re recycling, but we’re really sending much of our waste out of sight, out of mind. The great majority is not turned into new products, but piles up in poorly managed landfills or gets dumped into ocean and rivers or is burned, emitting harmful air pollution.
California is the largest exporter of plastic waste of any U.S. state. But the map of places willing to take our waste is shrinking: On June 22, Malaysia stopped accepting plastic waste from the US. Malaysia was the third-leading recipient of California’s plastic waste in 2024, receiving almost 10 million pounds.
Malaysia’s action came on the heels of similar bans implemented Jan. 1 in Indonesia and Thailand, which together received about two million pounds of plastic waste from California last year. Vietnam, the number two recipient of California’s plastic waste — more than 19 million pounds last year — is restricting the facilities allowed to receive it.
‘A Trojan Horse’: How Toxic Sewage Sludge Became a Threat to the Future of British Farming
For decades, sewage sludge has been quietly spread across Britain’s farmland, marketed as a nutrient-rich fertilizer. But insiders and scientists warn that hidden within it is a mix of household and industrial chemicals such as PFAS (“forever chemicals”), pharmaceuticals, pesticides, hormone-damaging chemicals and microplastics, threatening the long-term health of the land.
Every year, 768,000 tons of this byproduct of wastewater treatment is spread over 150,000 hectares of agricultural land in England. The practice is banned in some countries, such as Switzerland, but in the U.K. it continues with little scrutiny and has become a covert route for dumping toxic industrial waste, experts say.
“It’s a Trojan horse,” said a water sector insider. “Pfas, pharmaceuticals, endocrine disruptors and microplastics hidden in sludge threaten the long-term sustainability of humanity’s farmland.” These pollutants are not tested for under current regulations, which only require screening for a handful of heavy metals.
