So a recent post on x stated that glyphosate broke down very quickly in the environment and when I said give me some data he claimed between 7 and 60 days. And provided the following link.
https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/72651
Pesticide breakdown times are given in half lives. So when somebody tells you it will be gone and then gives you the half-life time they are either deliberately misleading you or very very foolish. The half-life is the time it takes half the material to degrade. There is still a significant amount of the material left.
It doesn’t matter how much you spray, half will be gone in the half life time. One way of thinking about this is that if you spray one acre half of that will be gone in let’s say 7 days. But if you spray 4 acres the increase in amount doesn’t matter each of those four acres acts the same and for each of them half will be gone in 7 days. It’s just that four times more degrades in that time because you applied four times as much.
I think we all can agree that a half life time for glyphosate of only 7 days is laughable. This would mean that in six half lives (0.5 * 0.5 [6 times] = .016) 98.4% would be gone. And six times seven is 42 days
So _if_ the half life for glyphosate is 7 days then 98.4% of all glyphosate used is gone 42 days (a month and a half) after it’s use. This is not even remotely possible given current scientific data on environmental levels.
So then let’s go with the other extreme — 60 days. In 2 months * 6 (a year) 98% would be gone. One year! This is far closer but not really reasonable either. It would not allow the significant buildup in the environment that we see today.
The pesticide companies flat out lie to you. It is untenable that all the glyphosate that’s used, 98% is gone in a year. There would be no buildup in our environment. There would be no toxic levels in groundwater, in soils, the ocean, and our own bodies. It’s not mathematically or scientifically reasonable. And I don’t think anybody really thinks that 2 months for half of it to go away is “quick.”
This guy’s own article (linked above) that he provided to “prove” his point that it breaks down quickly states that:
“So it may quickly wash out of sandy soils or last for more than a year in soils with a high clay content. Even when bound to soil particles, it may dissolve back into soil water later on, for example, in the presence of phosphates.”
“Or last for more than a year” in certain soils. Now we’re starting to get somewhere. Because of glyphosates chemical structure, it can migrate on and off any clay in the soil and this makes much more sense scientifically.
This is all the same story as DDT and Carbaryl propaganda, where the pesticide companies and their paid salesman (I will not dignify them by calling them scientists) published (OK, advertised) that DDT would break down in as little as 14 days. Really! They did!😄 But we now know that the half-life for DDT is far, far longer than that. The current estimate for the half-life of DDT in soil is between 2 and 30 years!
And again, 30 years is just a half life, so only half of it is gone in the worst case scenario of 30 years.
But it may be this worst case scenario as it is still all over our ocean floors and continues to poison our Marine biology here in California.
Our environmental groups have fallen flat on their face. We cannot get our politicians to be responsible. We cannot get our legal system to be responsible. We must create safe zones for ourselves, our children, and our native animals.
https://www.puravidaaquatic.com/wordpress/why-i-started-this/