Actually because of these lawsuits it's becoming hard to find glyphosate in stores. Most roundup has a new cocktail of herbicides which will probably end up being 10x worse than the original glyphosate.
Seeing roundup on shelves at home depot casts a spell. Because it is, it must.
There is no reason for pesticides for residential use. The virginal lawn is an aesthetic and just that. Fads and aspirations can change. Some aspirations are vile, some are virtuous. So let's ban it there. Then, some years after, when that hypnotic waft from the orgiastic excess of Roundup bottles at the garden center has evaporated, let's see how many people will still be carrying water for its industrial use.
I'm really cagey about using chemical pesticide/herbicides but Roundup will probably still be my first choice if I have to use it. It _still_ seems less bad than any of the alternatives.
Often times you're reaching for herbicides to get rid of plants that are otherwise hard to get rid of. Those same plants are ones that thrive in poor soils and conditions. Adding salt will just make the soil even worse for plants you _want_ to grow.
I've tried almost every home remedy available combatting Japanese Knotweed for years, and targeted glyphosate and careful mechanical removal are the only methods that even make a dent.
The goal is to get the grass to generate roots and then this will turn into a nice lush carpet. The thicker the carpet the more competition for resources.
I mow at 6" to keep germinating weeds from getting easy sunlight.
Oh that sucks. Luckily here the city even has flyers on how to have more natural lawns, which works naturally against grubs etc.
We have lots of dandelions, especially close to the street. So do the neighbors though they are the religious once a week mowers.
The trick I find is to let them be beautiful while it's mostly a sea of yellow and then mow as it turns into just ugly stalks with blown away seeds. And have a hedgerow so that you only need to mow the part between that and the street.
I've also sown in clover on purpose. Something many will try to eradicate. Stays green much longer and better in summers when the grass just turns brownish. Some neighbors around us irrigate. I refuse to do that. Very sandy soil to begin with (there's sand pits around) and grass on top of the septic system just doesn't thrive in hot dry summers. So we either get clover green, white and red or brown. Their choice.
Dandelions are pretty and seem to survive far better in my lawn than grass does. So dandelions it is. Can't imagine having neighbours that would complain.
Yes, I have close family that relies upon this method to clear weeds from between brick pavers. "Divided" describes my position well: the vinegar kills some of it, but the walk never gets fully clear. Contrast that with round-up, which would cause the weeds to whither and fall out and leave it clear for a few months.
It definitely smells better than round-up, and you don't have to think twice about it affecting pets...
You can also just use boiling water. Killing above ground vegetative structures is easy.
The problem for most people are perennial weeds with deep storage structures. It's very hard to kill those without a metabolic poison (or lots of labor over long times)
The safety data is clear, that mix is more toxic to humans. Vinegar works in high concentrations that are hard to buy because of how toxic it is. Dish soap generally doesn't biodegrade, so it builds up. Salting the earth is something you do to enemies when you want to starve them out and ensure their land is never useful again.
Yes, it will kill most things. Not great in the fields that need to grow grass for the horses to eat but works on most other things. I also use a propane torch mini flamethrower which is most fun on the Henbane. My disclaimer should I post incoherent comments at times...
It seems like the half-life in water is less than that in soil:
>* From literature studies, glyphosate’s half-life in surface waters and soil ranges from 2 to 91 days and from 2 to 215 days, respectively (Battaglin et al. 2014; Castro Berman et al. 2018).
>glyphosate’s half-life in surface waters ranges from 2 to 91 days
According to new research from Duke University, while it was always thought that glyphosate would break down very quickly in the environment, it seems to stick around a lot longer than we expected when it complexes in hard water.
This new research found that when glyphosate encounters certain trace metal ions that make water hard—like magnesium and calcium—glyphosate-metal ion complexes can form. Those complexes can persist up to 7 years in water and 22 years in soil.
An actived carbon filter will remove ~99.9% of Glyphosate from water, if for human consumption.
(source water from a ~100ft deep water table next to a large ag plot at a property, have both pre and post filter water tested to validate filtration effectiveness)
Your local university extension should be able to provide this service at a reasonable cost ($100-$500, depending on what is being tested for). There are commercial water testing firms, but I do not have experience with any that I could recommend.
A quality iron/hydrogen sulfide water filter sets you back about $2k, and will last ~10 years or ~500k gallons. If you do not have this in your water, you can safely skip. High iron can lead to iron reducing bacteria scumming up fixtures and, more importantly, rapidly dissolving a hot water heater tank. If you smell sulfur in your hot water when you shower on a well, that bacteria is eating up your tank's anode rod quicker than normally would (I also suggest a powered anode rod, good for 20+ years to keep a tank tip top vs having to replace consumable anode rods, but that is another topic). A three cartridge system will cost you a few hundred dollars for setup, replacing the cartridges roughly every year after ~100k gallons of water has passed through them (~$100-200/year, depending on cartridge filter selection). You can mix and match cartridges for your specific water contaminant filtering needs (sediment, iron, heavy metals, VOCs, pesticides, etc). I would agree with optimizing for use case, but RO systems can be costly and high maintenance depending on the demand put on them. They are ideal for low demand, low flow applications like a kitchen faucet or refrigerator water supply for water and ice. Design accordingly.
Do you measure concerning levels of glyphosate in the pre-filtration water? I've always been curious about this for the sake of my friends who live in rural areas near pesticide dependent farmers.
I send both a sample of raw water right off the well pump before going through any filtration as well as a sample of the filtered water that has gone through a 50 micron spin down filter, an iron and hydrogen sulfide filter, and then a three stage cartridge filter system (containing a 1 micron sediment filter, heavy metals filter, and active carbon filter), the output of which gets sent off as water supply to fixtures, appliances, etc. I have not noted concerning levels of glyphosate, but impurities can fluctuate and water tests are a snapshot in time of water quality.
“Found in drinking water” tells me nothing since current analytical techniques can detect compounds down to parts per trillion or better.
So you’re looking at 1 microgram in a liter of water.
Ok. But does it have any impact at levels like that? Is the impact more or less than the arsenic, mercury and other naturally occurring toxins in drinking water?
If there is one piece of scientific literacy that I wish the entire world had, it was the concept that toxicity is a function of dose.
Yes, fluoride is toxic. The EPA limit for fluoride is 4ppm, and that is probably too high (something like 2ppm would work better). There are parts of the country where the natural incidence of fluoride in groundwater is in excess of 4ppm, and therefore defluoridation needs to be done.
Fluoridation of drinking water is done to a standard of 0.5-0.75 ppm (US Public Health Service specifically recommends 0.7). Most of the country lives in places where the natural ground water concentration of fluoride is below this level, and thus fluoridation is necessary to reach the recommended level.
the real debate is on whether the toxicity of fluoride outweighs the benefits of using it to prevent tooth decay.
we know that it can cause issues. there are also issues that have not been measured.
a lot of folks forget that unless the outcome of X is death or cancer etc ... it is often not studied. your quality of life can be greatly reduced by something but if it doesn't kill you then no one is looking at it.
I won't argue about that being the best solution, but as someone that did not start to take dental health seriously until their 30's I don't think I'm in any position criticize others for their failure to do so.
It is toxic, it's rat poisoning. Do the lower levels of tooth decay outweigh the risks? So far they have decided yes in many places but that is changing (like lead pipes)
Fluoride in drinking water is a kind of truly marginal level of harm that’s perfectly designed to trigger paranoid libertarians.
A tiny amount of fluoride is helpful for bones and especially teeth. Fluoridated toothpaste covers this need perfectly, but many people don’t use it. Fluoride in drinking water covers this need also but (arguably) brings along small risks of symptoms of slight excess fluoride consumption.
The amounts that are actually put in drinking water do not seem to have any significant negative effects, and it seems reasonably clear that the population positive effects dominate, but being non-consensually subjected to a marginal risk of negative effect in order to achieve a positive outcome for the population is exactly the kind of thing that reliably provokes this kind of reaction from the paranoid libertarian set.
You'll notice one key thing is missing: Side by side comparison with communities that don't have fluoride in their water. That could be other countries. Or better, rural US communities that for the most part use well water. Those controls exist.
Note: Better diet also has an impact on oral health, and diet over the last 75 years has also improved.
I'm not saying not including that comparison is wrong, but as "the science" goes, it does feel odd that something so obvious is not included.
Peer-reviewed research isn’t a great standard, imo, for many reasons. There are sources available, ultimately it seems to turn into an ideological battle. FAN [1] probably has the most links out to different sets of research. Really it comes down to making your own decision, which is why I don’t think it should be automatically added to the water supply. Fortunately there are options to remove it.
Depends on the topic. If you're trying to prove (or, more accurately, fail to falsify) a certain set of results or a discovery, open data plus reproducibility should be the gold standard.
If you're trying to make decisions about personal health, it pays to take a cautious approach (IMO) and let people decide for themselves. It is not inconceivable that commercial entities finance "peer-reviewed research" in order to support public health policies.
A small but important reframing: I agree that (open data) + (reproducibility) + (review) is a better bar than any one in isolation.
(This applies to empirical sciences only. In contrast, for a mathematical paper, rigorous reviews of the formal logic are the gold-standard.)
I choose the phrase 'review' intentionally; it doesn't need to follow one of the typical [1] 'peer review' processes from a journal. There are likely alternative methods that are (at least as) or (more) effective. Some fields have seen amazing contributions from 'lay people' all across the world.
> If you're trying to make decisions about personal health, it pays to take a cautious approach (IMO) and let people decide for themselves.
For a person equipped with the time, skill, rationality, and motivation, I agree. But it is an empirical question to assess how many people have these skills. I also want to push back against what might be an individualistic bias [2] in the statement above. Even if one is an individualist, it isn't optimally efficient nor practical for an individual to 'take on' all this responsibility. It is rational and efficient to place some degree of trust in others.
[1] These processes vary and should be treated with a fair bit of skepticism. I want to to dig in more; e.g. to what degree have these processes been designed to account for human realities so as to maximize quality?
[2]: See also https://so2020.isosonline.org/conference/the-individualist-b... "Individualism claims that social entities (e.g. groups, institutions) are essentially nothing but suitably arranged aggregates of individuals. This is usually tried to be demonstrated through developing accounts of reduction or supervenience. Holism, on the other hand, claims that social entities are sui generis as something over and above individuals."
Peer review means someone knowledgeable about the subject read the paper and didn't spot anything wrong. They almost never attempt to reproduce anything.
Do you have a peer reviewed source on that? Major usually implies 50%+ . Are you saying that 50%+ of the peer reviewed scientific papers out there bogus and fraudulent?
I don’t think 50% or greater is a good standard for defining what we would consider to be a major problem with scientific fraud. I’m sure you’re well aware that “major” can refer to relative impact depending on the context of the issue being discussed. In the case of scientific publishing, I would argue that even 5% fraud rate would be grounds for labeling this as a major problem.
That said, this issue has received a lot of attention in recent years. Some articles try to put a positive spin on it but the stark truth of where we are today is that there are no standards enforced requiring data publishing (“available on request” doesn’t cut it) and reproducibility. This, combined with the amount of money in this industry and the impact that it has on public policy is an acceptable situation.
(This one puts a positive spin on the editorial process but the fact remains that there is a massive flood of fraudulent papers being published. Going back to standards of open data plus verified reproducibility would go a long way to mitigate this problem.
Replicated research. Peer review is when journals ask other researchers to look at a paper and determine whether it's suitable to be published. Attempting to replicate the findings is typically not part of the peer review process, peer review is a sniff test.
It’s fine to disagree, but please add something to the discussion. Remember, HN guidelines say the conversation should get more substantive as it goes on, not less.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5486281/
- https://www.health.state.mn.us/communities/environment/risk/...
The common message is Glyphosate has a very short (ish) half life in soil. What happens when it enters the water table first?