After being chased off the market in 2022 by the legal eagles at the Center for Food Safety, BASF’s trifludimoxazin-based Tirexor weed killer is being given another chance by Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
The EPA wants to approve this dangerous pesticide with human health risks including cancer, as well as non-cancerous damage to the liver, thyroid, epididymis (where sperm mature and are stored), spinal cord, and brain. Its neurotoxic risks include vomiting and trouble walking. Its reproductive risks include pregnancy loss, low birth weight babies, and skeletal malformations.
TAKE ACTION BY JULY 26: Stop EPA Approval of Trifludimoxazin!
Trifludimoxazin kills weeds by blocking the PPO enzyme, which is present in plants, but also animals. We need the PPO enzyme to produce heme, the iron-rich component of our red blood cells that carry oxygen from our lungs to our body’s tissues. According to the Center for Food Safety, this explains the adverse effects of trifludimoxazin seen in animal studies and it’s an indicator of what will happen to humans exposed to the herbicide.
In 2021, Biden’s EPA approved the weed killer trifludimoxazin for nationwide use on corn, soy and many other fruit, nut and vegetable crops, even though the agency's own analysis found that the chemical "will likely cause severe harm" to many threatened and endangered fish, including Chinook salmon steelhead trout, Atlantic sturgeon and smalltooth sawfish. Trifludimoxazinould would harm 1,796 endangered species and 921 critical habitats, devastating iconic wildlife like Monarch butterflies and rusty-patched bumblebees—with no protections from runoff into rivers, streams, and farms.
The failure to consider trifludimoxazin’s impact on endangered species is what allowed the Center for Food Safety to overturn the approval in court.
In addition to human health risks and harms to endangered species, trifludimoxazin can kill nontarget crops. It is 10 times more potent on soybeans than dicamba, the herbicide that has caused unprecedented damage across many millions of acres of soybeans over the past several years.
TAKE ACTION BY JULY 26: Stop EPA Approval of Trifludimoxazin!
Sign the Petition
PETITION TO THE EPA
The success of organic farming systems proves that herbicides are not needed to grow food.
Likewise, the fact that weed killers always end up breeding herbicide-resistant weeds, demonstrates the failure of synthetic farming systems.
What’s so insidious about the situation is that the synthetic chemical companies Bayer, BASF, ChemChina, and Corteva know this!
They let the problem of herbicide-resistant weeds fester until their chemical-dependent customers clamor for a new product. Then, they pretend that no new weed killers are available, and farmers just have to use more of the old stuff. Farmers use so much that the human health harms become unmistakable. Finally, the companies face such huge liability for cancer and neurological problems that they have to reformulate (as was the case with DDT, and now glyphosate and paraquat).
That’s when the companies start the approval process for new herbicides—that are just as toxic as the old ones.
BASF’s trifludimoxazin is particularly nasty. Its human health risks include cancer, as well as non-cancerous damage to the liver, thyroid, epididymis (where sperm mature and are stored), spinal cord, and brain. Its neurotoxic risks include vomiting and trouble walking. Its reproductive risks include pregnancy loss, low birth weight babies, and skeletal malformations.
Trifludimoxazin kills weeds by blocking the PPO enzyme, which is present in plants, but also animals. We need the PPO enzyme to produce heme, the iron-rich component of our red blood cells that carry oxygen from our lungs to our body’s tissues. This explains the adverse effects of trifludimoxazin seen in animal studies and it’s an indicator of what will happen to humans exposed to the herbicide.
Please reject BASF’s trifludimoxazin.
Thank you.