The Blacktown City Council building in New South Wales, Australia. Blacktown City Council / Facebook
A town council in Sydney says it will start to trial alternative herbicides after 500 workers went on strike due to safety concerns over glyphosate-based Roundup, according to the Australian Associated Press.
Glyphosate — designated a probable carcinogen by the WHO — is the active ingredient of Roundup, a weed killer produced by Monsanto, which merged with Germany's Bayer last year.Mike Mozart/ Flickr / CC BY 2.0
By Jessica Corbett
Austria is on track to become the first country in the European Union (EU) to fully ban the world's most commonly used herbicide after the nation's lower house of parliament passed a bill Tuesday that would outlaw all uses of glyphosate, which researchers and global health experts have tied to cancer.
Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks to the press as she arrives for an European Council Summit at The Europa Building in Brussels, on June 20. ARIS OIKONOMOU / AFP / Getty Images
German Chancellor Angela Merkel told her country's lower house of government that use of the controversial herbicide glyphosate will eventually die out, according to Reuters.
Many best sellers in the cereal aisle continue to have trace amounts of the weed killer glyphosate, according to a new report published Wednesday by the Environmental Working Group (EWG).
The skyline of Fort Myers Beach. YinYang / iStock / Getty Images
First Fort Myers banned plastic straws. Now it banned Roundup, or glyphosate, the controversial herbicide recently blamed for causing cancer by several juries, the News Press reports.
A third jury ruled that Monsanto's Roundup weedkiller caused cancer Monday, awarding a California couple more than $2 billion in damages. Not only is it the largest award in a Roundup trial to date, it is also the largest U.S. jury award this year and the eighth-largest product-defect award ever, Bloomberg reported.
"We really wanted to tell Monsanto, 'Cut it out, do better,' and we wanted to get their attention," juror Doug Olsen told Bloomberg of the award.
Germany's Bayer, which bought the U.S. agrochemical firm Monsanto, issued an apology on Sunday following reports that its American subsidiary drew up a list of those critical of the firm's practices.
Did you know that in order to receive organic certification, packaged foods must be free of not only toxic pesticides but also thousands of added chemicals like artificial preservatives, colors and flavors? Only 40 synthetic substances have been reviewed and approved for organic packaged foods. By contrast, thousands of chemicals can be added to conventional packaged foods, many of which don't require independent government review or approval for use.
Amid global debate over the safety of glyphosate-based herbicides such as Monsanto's Roundup, numerous claims have been made to defend the product's safety. In the wake of two recent landmark jury rulings that found Roundup to be a substantial factor in causing non-Hodgkin lymphoma, we examined some of these claims and fact-checked them for accuracy.
A man shops for Roundup in a California store. JOSH EDELSON / AFP / Getty Images
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced Tuesday that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup weedkiller, does not cause cancer, reaffirming its 2017 finding and contradicting juries who ruled the opposite in two high profile trials, Reuters reported.
