How Does Your Garden Grow?

Ontario plans to ban garden pesticides

Posted at 1:14 PM on 23 Apr 2008

The province of Ontario plans to ban the sale and use of garden pesticides. The legislation would keep lawn-owners in Canada's most populous province from using more than 70 chemicals present in more than 300 products. Critics cry double standard, though, as Ontario's golf courses, farms, and forests would be exempt from the ban. If approved, Ontario's pesticide regulations will be the toughest in North America -- which really isn't saying much, since the only other North American province or state with any sort of pesticide ban is Quebec. One day after Ontario introduced the ban, Home Depot got a jump on compliance, announcing that it will voluntarily yank traditional pesticides from its Canadian shelves by the end of the year.

sources: Reuters, Canwest News Service, The Globe and Mail
see also, in Grist: Umbra advises on planning a lawn

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Comments: (3 comments)

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Really?

I hope the ban includes rotenone, nicotine sulfate, veratrine, azadirachtin, salannin, and pyrethrin. They might be natural, but that doesn't mean they are good for you, your garden, beneficial insects, or innocent bystanders (not beneficial, but not really harmful).

We need consistent standards for identifying hazardous chemicals.

It is ridiculous that golf courses are excluded. I understand the exclusion of farms and forests, but drenching our world with chemicals so folks can whack a tiny ball around with a titanium stick? Absurd!!!!

by wiscidea at 3:43 PM on 23 Apr 2008

Ban All Petrochemical Pesticides

Pesticides made from petrochemicals should be completely banned. While Wiscidea is obviously correct that allowing pesticide use in order to merely play a game is absurd considering the harm the pesticides cause, there's no excuse for poisoning our planet for any reason. Humans have unfortunately created an artificial society that depends on massive ecological destruction, so that chemical agriculture has become the normal way to grow food and trees, and so that killing trees has become a normal way to live.

Re pesticides derived from petrochemicals as opposed to those derived from plants:

First, none of them are natural. They are all artificially synthesized by humans.

Second, and more importantly, while some plant-based pesticides are toxic, ALL petrochemical-based ones are. Because no artificially synthesized chemicals are natural, they all have some effect on the environment. But the ones derived from petrochemicals are almost universally worse.

by Wolverine at 11:07 AM on 24 Apr 2008

Canada is to be commended

for this pesticide ban and the banning of bisphenol A containing products yesterday. I hope the US gets on this bandwagon.

by catman at 1:13 PM on 24 Apr 2008

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