Must-read recap: The New Lede's top stories
Justice Department sues eBay over unlawful sales of pesticides, other products; Q&A with a new legal group focused on farm country; PFAS poses threat to wildlife, scientists say.
Justice Department sues eBay over unlawful sales of pesticides, other products
Online retail giant eBay has been illegally selling hundreds of thousands of harmful pesticides and other unsafe products, posing “unacceptable risks” to communities across the country, according to a complaint filed last week by the US Department of Justice (DOJ).
The legal action was filed on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in federal court in New York. It argues that the company’s actions violated environmental laws including the Clean Air Act (CAA), the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), and the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).
“The complaint filed today demonstrates that EPA will hold online retailers responsible for the unlawful sale of products on their websites that can harm consumers and the environment,” David Uhlmann, Assistant Administrator for EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, said in a press release.
The DOJ and EPA allege that eBay sold at least 23,000 unregistered, misbranded, and restricted use pesticides, including a highly toxic insecticide banned in the US, and products that make false claims about protecting against the virus that causes COVID-19. (Read the rest of the story.)
Q&A: Taking a stand — new legal group focuses on farm country
The US agriculture industry puts food on Americans’ tables, but many of the farming practices used to produce that food are controversial. Critics say large corporate interests dominate agriculture and push policies and practices that endanger human and environmental health and harm the interests of small farmers and rural communities.
A group of community advocates announced on September 20 that they were joining forces with legal and food system experts to form an organization they’re dubbing “FarmSTAND,” with the specific goal of challenging the companies that dominate US industrial animal agriculture through court actions. The group said it is working to dismantle a “corporate-controlled, industrial food system” and support regenerative farming to help “change the system from the ground up.”
The New Lede spoke with FarmSTAND Executive Director Jessica Culpepper about the group’s goals. (Read the rest of the Q&A.)
PFAS posing threat to wildlife, scientists say
Wildlife exposure to per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) poses added threats to species already struggling to adapt to habitat loss and harmful climate change, a new paper warns.
In a discussion paper published last week in Science of the Total Environment, scientists wrote that there is enough evidence of the toxicity of persistent chemicals such as PFAS in humans to cause substantial concern about the same chemicals’ impacts on wildlife. Considering toxic chemicals’ health harms to wildlife is especially important, they write, as multiple pressures cause steep drops in biodiversity worldwide.
“There’s an incredible body of scientific evidence linking PFAS to health harms in humans, and this should really serve as an indicator of the potential health harms that may be occurring in wildlife globally,” said David Andrews, a co-author on the paper and a senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group (EWG), an environmental advocacy group. (Read the rest of the story.)