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headspace-hotel:

The Horrors of Insecticides You Can Buy at Home Depot

Since saving the bees is something I am passionate about, I did a deep dive into lawn chemicals, specifically: insecticides.

So I spent like 4 hours today on the Home Depot website with several tabs open to various google searches and chemical safety and properties databases, taking notes on the insecticide chemicals that a random American homeowner can buy.

Conclusions, in summary: OH MY GOD. WHY IS THIS STUFF BEING SOLD IN STORES. WHY IS THIS ALLOWED ARE WE A LAWLESS WASTELAND?????

So the first thing I want to draw attention to is how these chemicals are labeled and advertised, and how this is deceptive and misleading.

On the Home Depot’s website, I found many products advertised to kill a specific variety of pest. Examples include:

You will also see many products advertised as effective against a broad variety of pests:

What’s wrong with this?

THEY HAVE THE SAME ACTIVE INGREDIENTS

All of these products, including the ones advertised for use against specific pests, are broad-spectrum insecticides that indiscriminately kill or harm almost all invertebrates, not even limited to insects. (We will come back to this in a second.) Often, the exact same chemical is advertised as a “spider killer,” “roach killer,” “wasp killer” and so on, just in different packaging.

“Black Flag” flea and tick killer, “Terminate” termite and carpenter ant spray, “Terro” ant killer, and “Cutter” bug control spray all have lambda-cyhalothrin as their active ingredient.

There are two other active ingredients in the products in the above list, prallethrin and imidacloprid. (See if you can guess which list items are the same chemical in a different bottle.)

The problem? This packaging makes people think they are buying a pest control with some level of targeted effectiveness against a specific type of pest, when they are actually buying an indiscriminate toxic substance that can kill almost anything alive enough to move.

The following information was mostly compiled from resources on the safety and properties of various chemicals found on pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. I also searched up documents from the EPA and various scientific papers studying the effects on specific organisms.

Lambda-Cyhalothrin

(mentioned above)

The US Environmental Protection Agency says this insecticide is “highly toxic to bees exposed to direct treatment or residues” and advises, “Do not apply this product or allow it to drift to blooming crops or weeds if bees are visiting the treatment area.” The EPA website also states, “This pesticide is extremely toxic to fish and aquatic invertebrates. Do not apply directly to water or areas where surface water is present…Do not apply when weather conditions favor drift from treatment areas.”

Since “water,” “wind,” and “bees” aren’t exactly uncommon phenomena outside, this leaves me wondering what applications these requirements don’t rule out. I’m particularly bemused by the bit about not allowing the product to drift from the treatment area, as if the average person has telekinetic powers that allow them to direct and confine an aerosolized mist.

Carbaryl

(found in some sprays and powders marketed under the label “Sevin”)

I know my parents used this stuff on our garden plants when I was a kid, so I read all of the information I am about to relay with absolute horror.

Carbaryl is highly toxic to bees, causing entire hives to perish when the deadly toxin is brought back to the hive by foraging workers. It is incredibly toxic to earthworms even at incredibly low concentrations. In reptiles, it negatively impacts the ability to move and flee from predators. In one study conducted with leopard frog tadpoles, exposure caused deformities in nearly 18% of tadpoles, while only one single tadpole in the control group showed similar deformities.

According to the EPA website, humans exposed chronically to carbaryl (for example agricultural workers) experience symptoms such as headaches, muscle weakness, and memory loss. In experiments done with rats, dietary exposure to carbaryl results in reduced fertility, lower litter sizes, and higher mortality in offspring.

Regarding cancer risk, the EPA states that “No information is available on the carcinogenic effects of carbaryl in humans,” which comes off as weirdly ominous in spite of the reassurance that animal studies haven’t shown an increase in cancer.

It is banned in the EU.

Its manufacturing was also responsible for the Bhopal disaster.

Bifenthrin

(found in a wide variety of insecticides including Ortho Home Defense, Ortho Bug-B-Gon, and some products sold under the Sevin label)

Bifenthrin is very highly toxic to fish, other aquatic life, and bees. It has been shown to accumulate in the bodies of bluegill sunfish. One of the studies referenced by PubChem involved collecting sediment from creeks in a suburban neighborhood and exposing amphipods (tiny water animals) to the sediment in a lab. In half of the samples, the sediment was so contaminated with bifenthrin (presumably from lawn care applications) that almost all the amphipods died.

Bifenthrin is classified as a possible human carcinogen and may cause a wide variety of other respiratory and neurological symptoms. It also interferes with hormone receptors in humans and is considered to be “of significant concern with respect to maternal-fetal health.” It has also been shown to mess with the immune system and potentially is a cause of asthma even at “acceptable” levels of exposure.

Cypermethrin

(found in Raid and many Spectracide products)

Incredibly toxic to bees and aquatic life, with one study showing 75%-95% mortality within 24 hours of exposure in bees. It has been shown to cause deformities and reproductive problems in many fish. It is a possible human carcinogen.

There have been a ton of animal studies where feeding animals doses of it over time, or giving them acute doses, causes a huge array of horrifying results, including incontinence, seizures, convulsions, dehydration, weight loss and unwillingness to eat, writhing spasms, hypersensitivity to stimuli, lowered testosterone, lowered sperm production, developmental delays in offspring, and “dopaminergenic neurodegeneration,” whatever that means.

Residues of the stuff have been found to last up to 84 days in homes (hopefully at low concentrations).

Cypermethrin is also particularly highly toxic to cats. This is why you do NOT use flea and tick shampoos meant for dogs on a cat.

Imidacloprid

(sold as “tree and shrub protection” products, which is insidious considering how awful this pesticide is, as well as “Bioadvanced Spray Home Pest Insect Killer,” “Ike’s Systemic Landscape Care,” and other products under the “Bioadvanced” or “Ike’s” label)

A neonicotinoid pesticide that causes toxicity effects at 10 parts per billion in bumble bees. It is also ACUTELY toxic to many birds. One study investigates an incident where 26 American goldfinches were found dead on the ground after some elm trees were treated with imidacloprid. A review of studies and reports of toxicity to birds tallies up 734 dead birds reportedly associated with this pesticide.

As a neonicotinoid, imidacloprid works by dissolving in water and being absorbed by a plant, which effectively makes the whole plant including flowers and pollen poisonous to insects. Because of this, neonicotinoids have been suspected to be a major cause of the decline of pollinators.

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This is only some of the most common or popular active ingredients for insecticides, there are many others. You will notice that each one listed is INCREDIBLY toxic to bees!

I wrote this out because I feel it’s important to raise awareness, because I think the branding and labeling on these products makes them appear much safer and more precise than they really are.

They’re labeled as insecticides, but that’s misleading. They’re poisons, and insects are only some of many things they harm or kill.

And it really hits me: is this the best we have??? These incredibly broad-spectrum poisons that kill not only “pest” insects but bees, fish, and songbirds too??? Killing pests with imidacloprid or cypermethrin is like trying to scramble an egg by throwing hand grenades at it!

People are spraying this stuff as a matter of course on their lawns. In their homes. Around their children. Even on vegetables in their gardens. Because that’s just what you do, because “bugs” make a space dirty, contaminated, and unfit for your children to play in. Yes there are warnings on the bottle, but they are no more compelling or eye-catching than the warnings on a bottle of dish soap. There are a lot of bug sprays with a “clean fresh scent,” which is a little troubling for a substance you really should not be inhaling at all.

People don’t know their “flea and tick killer” kills monarch butterflies and bumble bees, and they really don’t have an inkling of how seriously they should take the warning label.

I glimpsed at the questions buyers had asked for one of the products, I forget which, and I saw a lady asking if she had to remove the dishes from her cabinet before spraying the insecticide in the cabinet.

Yeah.