EPA Registration Review

Because chlorpyrifos is currently undergoing EPA registration review, you may have questions about what that is, why it’s happening, how it works, what sort of regulatory conclusions flow from it and how you can participate in the process.

Here are some answers to those questions.

What is EPA Registration Review?

Pesticides are expected to perform their intended function of controlling pests while posing negligible risk to people and animals and minimal environmental risk. To facilitate this, prior to being used in the U.S. all pesticides must be registered by the Environmental Protection Agency, which determines which uses of these products are acceptable.

Under federal law, EPA is only allowed to register a pesticide to protect food crops if, based on the best available scientific information, exposures from intended uses pose a “reasonable certainty of no harm” to people, including potentially sensitive individuals, such as children and pregnant women.

Federal law also requires that, once registered, a pesticide be subject to periodic Registration Review. These reviews update regulatory assessments with the latest information so that health-based and environmental standards remain protective and exposures are kept to acceptable levels.

If new concerns arise as a result of one of these reviews, EPA has the authority to require additional studies to resolve its concerns about the product in question, to mandate changes in conditions of use for the product, or if need be to halt use by cancelling the registration for specific uses or the product as a whole.

Under existing regulatory timetables, all 700+ pesticide active ingredients must be formally reevaluated every 15 years. In evaluating pesticides, EPA continually strives to improve the quality of its assessments while maintaining a collaborative, open process that is transparent to interested stakeholders.

Because EPA regulatory evaluations are science-driven and very complicated, they generally take many years to complete. As a consequence, by the time the Agency completes one review of a given pesticide, it may be almost time for the Agency to start work on the next. Such has been the case with chlorpyrifos.