Online retailers burrow under federal restrictions on selling SGARs to consumers
E-commerce sites like Amazon make it easier than ever to avoid the EPA’s ban on consumer sales of SGARs.
In 2021, journalist Chris Sweeny wrote an article for the National Audubon Society’s magazine about how online retailers have created a gaping breach in the EPA’s ban on consumer sales of products containing second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides (SGARs).
After reading Chris’s article, I decided to see whether any progress had been made in the nearly three years since its publication. The short answer: Nope. After logging into my Amazon account and entering ‘bromadiolone’ in the search bar, I received the result below.
‘Amazon’s choice’ for a product containing SGARs.
This is baffling. According to the EPA’s website: “[S]econd-generation anticoagulant rodenticides no longer are registered for use in products geared toward consumers and are registered only for the commercial pest control and structural pest control markets. Second-generation anticoagulants registered in the United States include brodifacoum, bromadiolone, difenacoum, and difethialone.” The lawyer in me is concerned that no Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) citation accompanies this statement.
I tried to find the relevant regulations on regulations.gov and other databases. Unfortunately, I had no luck. When I called EPA’s Region 1 headquarters in Boston for help, they told me that the regulations had not been finalized and to stay tuned for updates. Eight years and counting seems a very long time to codify regulations enforcing a federal policy. But, before we examine how e-commerce has seemingly undermined federal law in this area, let’s discuss the reasons behind the EPA’s ban on consumer retailers selling SGARs. Here’s an excerpt from an article that appeared in Scientific American in 2010:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has known for a generation that kids have too-easy access to these super-toxic rat poisons. Every year, more than 10,000 kids are getting hold of them, and virtually all of these calls to U.S. poison control centers concern children under the age of 3.
Black and Hispanic children living below the poverty line are disproportionately affected. For example, a study in New York found that 57 percent of children hospitalized for eating rat poison from 1990 to 1997 were African-American and 26 percent were Latino.
EPA reported that these rat poisons “are, by far, the leading cause of [pesticide-related] visits to health care facilities in children under the age of six years and the second leading cause of hospitalization.”
Between 2004 and 2008, U.S. poison control centers continued to receive 10,000 to 14,000 calls about the rat killers annually. The EPA has estimated that these incidents reported to poison-control centers probably accounted for only about one-fourth of all exposures.
After tens of thousands of reported accidental exposures to rat poisons, the EPA finally banned consumer retailers from selling SGARs in 2015. However, Chris could still order SGARs from www.diypestcontrol.com, eBay, and Walmart. The only meaningful restriction Chris encountered was shipping the products to California, which banned using SGARs outside of extremely limited circumstances in 2020.
SGARs have been implicated in the deaths of several bald eagles in Massachusetts since 2021.
For RPW, advocacy on the e-commerce issue represents an essential aspect of our strategy for reducing the risk of exposure to SGARs on a broader scale. Exclusion is the foundation of integrated pest management (IPM). Accordingly, if we can act to exclude SGARs from our community, we will do so.
What can you do? Send your elected officials a letter (you can use our template) asking them to hold online retailers accountable for their actions undermining public health and the integrity of our local ecosystems.
