Pesticide degradation is the process by which a pesticide is transformed into a benign substance that is environmentally compatible with the site to which it was applied. Globally, an estimated 1 to 2.5 million tons of active pesticide ingredients are used each year, mainly in agriculture. Forty percent are herbicides, followed by insecticides and fungicides. Since their initial development in the 1940s, multiple chemical pesticides with different uses and modes of action have been employed. Pesticides are applied over large areas in agriculture and urban settings. Pesticide use, therefore, represents an important source of diffuse chemical environmental inputs.
Persistence
In principle, pesticides are registered for use only after they are demonstrated not to persist in the environment considerably beyond their intended period of use. Typically, documented soil half-lives are in the range of days to weeks. However, pesticide residues are found ubiquitously in the environment in ng/liter to low μg/liter concentrations. For instance, surveys of groundwater and not-yet-treated potable water in industrialized countries typically detect 10 to 20 substances in recurrent findings above the maximum accepted drinking water concentration for pesticides in many countries. About half of the detected substances are no longer in use and another 10 to 20% are stable transformation products.
Pesticide residues have been found in other realms. Transport from groundwater may lead to a low-level presence in surface waters. Pesticides have been detected in high-altitude regions, demonstrating sufficient persistence to survive transport across hundreds of kilometers in the atmosphere.
Degradation involves both biotic and abiotic transformation processes. Biotic transformation is mediated by microorganisms, while abiotic transformation involves processes such as chemical and photochemical reactions. The specific degradation processes for a given pesticide are determined by its structure and by the environmental conditions it experiences. Redox gradients in soils, sediments or aquifers often determine which transformations can occur. Similarly, photochemical transformations require sunlight, available only in the topmost meter(s) of lakes or rivers, plant surfaces or submillimeter soil layers. Atmospheric phototransformation is another potential remediating influence.
Information on pesticide degradation is available from the required test data. This includes laboratory tests on aqueous hydrolysis, photolysis in water and air, biodegradability in soils and water-sediment systems under aerobic and anaerobic conditions and fate in soil lysimeters. These studies provide little insight into how individual transformation processes contribute to observed degradation in situ. Therefore, they do not offer a rigorous understanding of how specific environmental conditions (e.g., the presence of certain reactants) affect degradation. Such studies further fail to cover unusual environmental conditions such as strongly sulfidic environments such as estuaries or prairie potholes, nor do they reveal transformations at low residual concentrations at which biodegradation may stop. Thus, although molecular structure generally predicts intrinsic reactivity, quantitative predictions are limited.
Biotic transformation
Biodegradation is generally recognized as the biggest contributor to degradation. Whereas plants, animals and fungi (Eukaryota) typically transform pesticides for detoxification through metabolism by broad-spectrum enzymes, bacteria (Prokaryota) more commonly metabolize them. This dichotomy is likely due to a wider range of sensitive targets in Eukaryota. For example, organophosphate esters that interfere with nerve signal transmission in insects do not affect microbial processes and offer nourishment for microorganisms whose enzymes can hydrolyze phosphotriesters. Bacteria are more likely to contain such enzymes because of their strong selection for new enzymes and metabolic pathways that supply essential nutrients. In addition, genes move horizontally within microbial populations, spreading newly evolved degradation pathways.