Correction to LEED reporting

I thought I had vetted my notes on the NCUE meeting last week, but was corrected this weekend on a few critical points by my friend, Dr. Chris Geiger, with the City and County of San Francisco (CSF). Chris is the most knowledgeable entomologist I know when it comes to LEED credit language and IPM, and has been integral to the pesticide hazard ranking system used by CSF.

My mistake in reporting had more to do with the talk by Tim Husen on PMP frustrations with LEED. At least some of the issues Dr. Husen and others in the past (including myself) have had with LEED pesticide language have since been corrected by the U.S. Green Building Council, keepers of LEED certification.

Dr. Geiger pointed out that there was never any official San Francisco Tier III list of pesticides. Several years ago there was a temporary listing of pesticides put up by the City, "but it was not at all exhaustive and went quickly out of date."  Unfortunately the list lives on in older web pages, and some governments and architects still refer to the Tier III list as if it were the universally accepted standard of P.C. (pesticide correctness).

Instead, the CSF maintains a series of criteria for determining hazard tier of pesticides.  Under LEED, some pesticides that are classified as least-toxic (low risk, Tier III) under these criteria are exempt from resident notification requirements in the LEED-for Existing Buildings Operations and Maintenance.  There is no longer any list of pesticides, since registered products change so quickly; however the Pesticide Research Institute compares pesticides to these criteria in the PestSmart app I mentioned.

So apologies to Dr. Geiger and CSF for my misunderstanding, and thanks for the polite redirect. My notes, and last week's blog post have been corrected.  To see the LEED IPM credit language for IPM in Existing buildings, click here.

Talking about pesticide risk

How many times have you been asked some variation of the question, "How toxic is that pesticide?" Maybe it's been in the form of a statement from a new customer: "I'm expecting," or "I'm chemically sensitive."  Or perhaps you've heard, "Will your spray hurt my puppy?"

How we answer that question says a lot about our credibility and our professionalism.  So it might just pay to think about some of the better ways to talk about pesticide risk. I'm not an expert in risk communication, but I've had the opportunity to talk with lots of people about pesticides.  And I find that most people are a lot more accepting of pesticides as tools if they are approached properly and with an olive branch rather than a stick.

Of course, if people made decisions about risk based on logic and reasoning, we could answer questions about pesticide risk with facts and figures.  But experts in the field of risk perception tell us that when it comes to assessing risk none of us are very rational. Hence we fret over the threat of catching Ebola in America (1: 13.3 million), but don't worry daily about being in a car accident (1: 9,100 chance this year).  For this reason, I know we won't convince everyone to hire a pest control company tomorrow, but I believe with the right approach, we can offer consumers a little peace of mind about their pest control service.

Here are a few suggestions for talking with potential customers about pesticide risk:

• Show your customer you care. Let them know you are concerned about their safety and make every effort to keep indoor pesticide use to a minimum through the use of IPM (assuming this is true!). Assure your customer that you use only those pesticides that are necessary to do the job you're being asked to do. 
• Avoid use of the word “safe”. There is no guarantee of absolute safety for any pesticide, or drug--or any activity we do, for that matter. Instead use the concept of risk. We can guarantee a level of risk, if we can never guarantee absolute safety (a one in a million risk is not absolutely “safe”). Although the EPA does not “approve” pesticides, it will not register a pesticide unless it's persuaded that there is no unreasonable risk of adverse effects associated with its label uses. 
• Pet peeve: Avoid comparing the toxicity of pesticides to food items like table salt. While it's true that table salt has toxicity, and some insecticide LD50 values show less toxicity than table salt, most people don’t buy it. After all, we produce salt to be ingested. Insecticides are produced to kill stuff. Its apples and oranges--not a fair comparison. When comparing toxicity, compare your products to another pesticide or consumer product that the customer already uses. For example, many pets are treated by vets for fleas with the same active ingredients used in household pest control. If they have already accepted the risk in applying a product to their pets, then it’s not unreasonable to propose use of the same product outdoors or in protected crevices of the home with even less exposure. 
• Let your customer know that you are concerned about the risk of working with pesticides, because your exposure risk is so much higher than theirs. This sort of explanation is especially helpful because we base many personal decisions on the experiences of friends and acquaintances. Your confidence in your ability to work safely with pesticides is a powerful witness to those you meet.

For potential customers who believe they are sensitive to chemicals, especially pesticides, you may need a slightly different approach. Ironically, these folks often need to be talked out of using pesticides. What I mean is that even chemically sensitive clients think they need an "organic" pesticide or repellent, to get rid of their pests. Even though they are chemical averse, they are still of the idea that there is a chemical (albeit natural) out there to control their pest problem.

Often these callers haven't considered the possibility that there might be a non-chemical solution to their pest problem. This is where knowing your pests comes in. You might be able to offer some environmental modifications, pest proofing or biological control options that can moderate or lessen the pest problem sufficiently.  Or you might be able to confine treatments to outdoor areas.  Or they might consider baits (termites, ants, some other crawling insects) as non-volatile, hypoallergenic alternatives to sprays, dusts or aerosols.

This month it might be worth a little time talking with your staff about how to better talk about pesticide risks. Your sincerity, along with that olive branch, can go a long way toward making that customer with pesticide concerns a customer for life.

U.S. EPA celebrates the 40 year mark

Like Hurricane Katrina and climate change, and the honey bee decline today, the Cuyahoga River fire in 1969 caught people's attention about the state of our environment like headlines never did.

I was in high school when the Environmental Protection Agency opened its doors 40 years ago today. That might not seem like something a high school student would be interested in, but as a budding environmentalist, passionate outdoor enthusiast and Earth Day organizer, I was very interested.

At the time of the late 60's protection of the environment was not a high priority for our government. Concerns about waste disposal, clean air and water, pesticides and wildlife were growing and regularly reported in newspapers and magazines. Thanks in large part to the EPA, there is much to celebrate about the state of our U.S. environment. Streams run cleaner, food is (arguably) safer, the air is much clearer in most parts of the country, and standards for pesticide safety have never been higher. The bald eagle is back, as are peregrine falcons and ospreys and brown pelicans.

We're certainly not without challenges and controversies today. Rapid climate change has even our best scientists perplexed about causes and solutions. Fisheries continue to decline. Pockets of unhealthy air persist. Toxic chemical waste proliferates, even with (or because of) our technological advances to computers. Trash in our streams seems worse than ever thanks to our ubiquitous plastic. Oil hasn't run out, though we see the limits to fossil fuel based energy more clearly than ever. Worldwide, more species have vanished, or are threatened, than we might have guessed 40 years ago.

With all the popular hue and cry about shrinking big government, I for one am thankful that our country had the foresight forty years ago to set up an independent agency to guard our natural heritage.

I know that government itself needs its watchdogs, and EPA is no exception. Nevertheless, I fear that in our scramble to cut budgets, we may forget the progress of the past 40 years, and lose sight of the need for an independent arm of government with an interest in the future of our world at its heart. A strong environmental ethic is exactly the export we need in this era of global exploitation of the environment. Just look at the Aral Sea (formerly USSR, today Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) and the Yangtze River valley (China) and many of the other environmental disaster areas if you need a reminder of what unrestrained environmental exploitation looks like.

Here's a toast to all the dedicated workers at the EPA who have worked so hard to please Congress and Presidents past, while keeping their eyes on the prize of a cleaner world.

A primer on the NPDES and its potential impact on pest control

Clean water is in everyone's best interest. 
Guadalupe River State Park.

Last week the Advisory Committee for the Texas Department of Agriculture's Structural Pest Control Service met in Austin. The advisory committee meets quarterly to offer suggestions and feedback to TDA on rules and regulations pertaining to pest control in Texas. Much of the time in last week's meeting was spent learning about the upcoming EPA rules governing pesticide applications around waterways. If you haven't yet heard about this issue, it is a topic of hot debate right now among PMPs around the country.

At stake is whether PMPs will be subject to notification and permitting rules required under the Clean Water Act. To understand the issue, you must first understand something about the Clean Water Act itself and the recent court decisions affecting how the EPA administers the law.

The Clean Water Act
The Clean Water Act (CWA) was passed in 1972 (with significant amendments in 1977 and 1987) as the nation's premier law protecting the quality of water in navigable streams, rivers, lakes and wetlands. In Section 301(a), the Act  prohibits discharging any pollutant unless the discharge is in compliance with permitting provisions of the Act (the CWA specifically exempted agricultural stormwater and irrigation discharges). According to the law, pollutants includes, among other things, “garbage… chemical wastes, biological materials …and industrial, municipal, and agricultural waste discharged into water.” 

One way a person may discharge a pollutant legally is by obtaining a permit under the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES). Under section 402(a) of the law, EPA may issue permits to discharge pollutants if certain conditions are met. Two types of permits are available: individual and general. Permits are generally granted for a set period, no greater than five years. General permits are granted (usually by the state) when multiple facilities/sites/activities will generate pollution. To establish a general permit, the EPA or a state develops and issues the permit in advance. Permits generally cover certain types of activities and set the guidelines for what levels of discharge are covered by the permit. Anyone wishing to make a discharge into a waterway must request coverage under the permit through submission of a Notice of Intent (NOI).

Pesticides and the CWA 
Nearly everyone agrees that the CWA has been a significant factor in improvements seen in the nation's riverways and coastal waters.  However, pesticides have been a burr under the saddle of some environmentalists, as pesticide applications have remained largely unaffected and unregulated by the CWA. During the past 38 years, EPA has never issued a permit to apply a pesticide to a waterway. This is because the agency has considered all such applications come under the authority of the Federal Insecticide Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), an EPA-regulated law that most of us in pest control are very familiar with. Among other things, FIFRA sets use guidelines for the use of every pesticide.  Only label uses that do not pose an unreasonable adverse effect on the environment will be approved by the EPA.  Such decisions are made following a comprehensive and expensive label approval process; hence it has historically been EPA's opinion that FIFRA adequately protected waterways from pesticides.

This position has been challenged in court numerous times over the years, leading EPA in November, 2006 to issue a final rule clarifying the two specific circumstances in which an NPDES permit was not required to apply pesticides to or around water. The rule said a permit was not required for: 1) the application of pesticides directly to water to control pests; and 2) the application of pesticides to control pests that are present over, including near, water where a portion of the pesticides will unavoidably be deposited to the water to target the pests. The rule became effective on January 26, 2007.

All this changed on January 9, 2009. In the case, National Cotton Council of America v. EPA, the Sixth Circuit Court nullified (vacated) EPA’s Pesticides Rule. The Court held that whenever there is a residue that is left in water after a pesticide targets a pest (which is essentially always), that pesticide should be considered a pollutant under the CWA. The court went on to say that the CWA should, in fact, require that any applicator who applies pesticides into a waterway must first be required to obtain an NPDES permit.

The EPA responded to this decision by requesting a two-year stay of the mandate to provide the Agency and NPDES-authorized states time to develop general permits and to provide outreach and education to the regulated community. In June, 2009, the Sixth Circuit Court agreed and granted EPA the two-year stay.  According to this ruling, the final plan must be implemented no later than April 10, 2011.

The National Pesticide Permit Plan
On June 2, 2010, the EPA revealed its plan to address the Sixth Circuit Court ruling. The plan includes a draft of a permit system for point source discharges for the application of pesticides to water. Called the Pesticides General Permit (PGP), the plan EPA revealed this spring will serve as a model for NPDES-authorized states (like Texas) to develop their own PGPs.

Perhaps the most significant part of the EPA national PGP is that it outlines what sort of pesticide applications will be required to get a permit. The plan identifies four types of pesticide applications that will require an NPDES permit:

• applications of pesticides to water for control of aquatic weeds
• applications of pesticides to forest canopies over streams and rivers
• community mosquito control
• aquatic nuisance animal pest control (e.g., piscicides for trash fish, zebra mussel, lamprey, etc.)

In addition to defining these categories, the PGP set annual thresholds, above which applicators will be required to file an NOI.

• Aquatic herbicide (or nuisance animal pesticide) applications in waters exceeding 20 acres of open water or 20 linear miles of shoreline application
• Forestry canopy applications greater than 640 acres
• Mosquito control applications to areas greater than 640 acres

As an example, if you apply mosquito adulticides to less than 640 acres (one square mile) a year, you will be covered by the state's general permit and will not have to file any paperwork.

On the surface, it appears to me that the NPDES permitting system, if similar to the EPA's general permitting plan now, probably will have little impact on the day-to-day operations of most pest control companies.

In Texas the agency that is developing our state's permit is the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ).  According to Jimmy Bush, TCEQ is anxious to involve stakeholders in the process to develop a state permitting plan.  The agency has set up a website about the issue, and, in fact, held its first stakeholder meeting today to discuss concerns.  The Texas Pest Control Association was in attendance and will certainly report the issues discussed.  The TCEQ is under a deadline to submit its final plan by December, 2010.

How will the new regulations affect you?
This is a complex law, and few people seem to understand it in all its complexities.  From what I learned at TDA last week, however, the NPDES permitting system does not seem to be directly targeting the pest control industry.  Nevertheless, there will be changes in the way pesticides are regulated in the state; and, as always, with change comes uncertainty.  Some potential unanswered questions about the permitting process come to mind:

• Will terrestrial applications of pesticides eventually (perhaps through court action) come under the permitting process?  This has not been the intent of rulings to date, and seems unlikely, but some urban pesticides have been showing up in urban stormwater runoff and it's possible that someone could argue in court that such applications should be construed as pollutants under the CWA.
• How will acreages of coverage be calculated for mosquito control?  Will every yard fogged in community mosquito control programs be counted toward the acreage threshold, or will there be criteria for calculating acreage next to waterways?  Currently the EPA PGP states that acreage will include "acreage over water or conveyances with a hydrologic surface connection to waters of the U.S. at the time of pesticide application."  This is still a vague definition, in my opinion.
• How will mosquito mister systems be handled?  
• What kind of additional paperwork, if any, will companies be required to keep?  Right now it appears that everyone will be on the honor system to report whether or not your company exceeds the annual thresholds for water applications.  What responsibilities will companies be required to bear in order to show they have NOT met the thresholds required for an NOI?
• What will the Notice of Intent look like and what requirements will it carry?  This will be of greatest concern to forest managers and mosquito control districts; but it could affect larger companies who annually treat larger communities.
• Will large companies be allowed to consider individual franchises as independent entities, or will the Orkin and Terminix franchises around the state be required to pool their acres treated?  If the latter, then larger companies will run increased risk of having to file an NOI.
• Should the pest control industry be happy that terrestrial pesticide applications seem to be outside the realm of these CWA rules, or should the industry prefer to be included in individual state permits so that the rules can be clearly known and thresholds set at reasonable levels?  

If you want to learn more about the CWA changes regarding pesticides, go to the EPA site for NPDES.  If you have opinions that you want to share with TCEQ, the few months will be critical.  Under the impending court order this is one time government will move quickly.

Pennsylvania researchers summarize progress on Colony Collapse Disorder in bees

Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, has certainly had its fifteen minutes of fame over the past two years. A serious problem for commercial beekeepers, this new threat to managed honey bees has puzzled researchers. For an up-to-date report from the leading U.S. research team, check out the new article in Scientific American magazine. According to researchers, pesticides, often singled out as a likely culprit in bee die-offs, have not been ruled out as a factor in colony deaths, but less likely as a prime cause. New molecular techniques seem to point to a recently discovered virus as the principal suspect.