The USEPA faces many challenges in assessing the ecological risks of indoor and outdoor residential pesticide uses. The use of pesticides in urban environments result in residues entering surface water and wastewater. Assessing exposure from outdoor uses remains a challenge because of the difficulty in quantifying residential pesticide use and constructing meaningful residential scenarios for modeling at a national scale. In the past, the Agency has relied on urban monitoring data and simplistic Pesticide Root Zone Model (PRZM) scenarios to estimate aquatic exposures for outdoor residential uses.  Currently, data are being collected to estimate housing density, pesticide wash-off from impervious surfaces, runoff from representative house lots, and timing, method and frequency of pesticide applications for use in developing tools to assess exposure from outdoor urban uses. For urban indoor pesticide uses, typically the Agency has relied on the Exposure and Fate Assessment Screening Tool (E-FAST), which estimates exposure from pesticides released to domestic wastewater.  Recently conducted bench-scale treatability studies and Publically Owned Treatment Works (POTW) monitoring data should allow further refinement of estimates of pesticides in effluent water, receiving water bodies, and biosolids, from wastewater treatment plants, resulting from indoor uses.  Finally, for insecticide use related to public vector mosquito control (i.e., adulticides), the Agency has used an approach based on the AGricultural DISPersal (AGDISP) drift model, which has also been applied to the Terrestrial Residue Exposure (T-REX) model.

Approaches to regulation of urban pesticide uses

248th National Meeting (2014)

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