Considering human exposure to pesticides in food products: Importance of dissipation dynamics

The general public is continuously concerned about effects from pesticide exposure via residues in food crops. However, impacts from pesticide exposure are mostly neglected in food product-related LCAs. Time-to-harvest and dissipation from crops mainly drive residue dynamics with dissipation as most uncertain aspect in characterization modeling.

We analyzed measured half-lives (n=4513) with 95% falling between 0.6 and 29 days. With ~500 pesticides authorized alone in the EU for several hundred crops, however, experimental stud-ies only cover few possible pesticide-crop combinations. Therefore, we estimated dissipation from measured data and provide reference half-lives for 333 pesticides applied at 20°C under field conditions.

Our framework allows for detailed explorations of dietary choices in LCA with respect to human health impacts from pesticide exposure via crop consumption. The next step is to include pesticide exposure via crop consumption along with improved pesticide dissipation data into existing LCIA methodologies for consideration in future LCA studies.