Prevalence of pesticides in postconsumer agrochemical polymeric packaging

Abstract

Pesticide remains contained in agrochemical packagingwaste are a source of uncontrolled risk for human health; they are also a quality feedstock for the plastic recycling industry.Many governments have recently started to establish laws and regulations to develop systems for recovering and recycling the polymeric packages used for pesticides. There is also a demand in having a procedure to control the suitability of the pesticide packages to be reused.We have developed a two-step operation process to assess the pesticide residues in agricultural containers made of a variety of polymeric matrices. The procedure is based on an extraction with a solvent mixture followed by UPLC-MS/MS determination. Solvents for neutral pesticides were selected considering the Hildebrand solubility (δ) of solvents and polymers togetherwith those estimated for the pesticides. The proposed technique is effective in recovering imbibed pesticides in polymeric matrices. Also, a simplified extraction procedure has been tested to become a routine method for these wastes. We have found that in many cases a significant amount of pesticides remain into the polymeric matrix, even after a standardized cleaning; the impact of releasing these hazardous compounds into the environment is to be of further consideration.

The authors gratefully acknowledge generous support from the European Commission, SCT Programme MED, 2G-MED09-15, 2013, for the AgroChePack Project. The authors also want to thank to the professors Demetres Briassoulis and Miltiadis Hiskakis of Agricultural University of Athens, Greece, for providing the pesticide containers of Visaltia farmers.