Trifluralin is a commonly used pre-emergence
herbicide. With about used in the United States in 2001, it is one of the most widely used herbicides. Trifluralin is generally applied to the soil to provide control of a variety of annual grass and broadleaf weed species. It inhibits root development by interrupting mitosis, and thus can control weeds as they germinate.
Environmental Regulation
Trifluralin has been banned in the
European Union
The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been de ...
since 20 March 2008, primarily due to high toxicity to aquatic life.
Trifluralin is on the United States
Environmental Protection Agency list of Hazardous Air Pollutants as a regulated substance under the
Clean Air Act.
Environmental behavior
Trifluralin undergoes an extremely complex fate in the environment and is transiently transformed into many different products as it degrades, ultimately being incorporated into soil-bound residues or converted to carbon dioxide (mineralized). Among the more unusual behaviors of trifluralin is inactivation in wet soils. This has been linked to transformation of the herbicide by reduced soil minerals, which in turn had been previously reduced by soil microorganisms using them as
electron acceptors in the
absence of oxygen. This
environmental degradation process has been reported for many structurally related herbicides (
dinitroaniline Dinitroanilines are a class of chemical compounds with the chemical formula C6H5N3O4. They are derived from both aniline and dinitrobenzenes. There are six isomers: 2,3-dinitroaniline, 2,4-dinitroaniline, 2,5-dinitroaniline, 2,6-dinitroaniline, 3, ...
s) as well as a variety of explosives like TNT and
picric acid.
[Tor, J., C. Xu, J. M. Stucki, M. Wander, G. K. Sims. 2000. Trifluralin degradation under micro-biologically induced nitrate and Fe(III) reducing conditions. Env. Sci. Tech. 34:3148-3152.]
References
External links
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{{Herbicides
Preemergent herbicides
Nitrobenzenes
Anilines
Trifluoromethyl compounds
Endocrine disruptors