Abstract
The outstanding performance of atrazine with respect to selective herbicidal effects and crop tolerance is coupled with relative recalcitrance in the environment and tendency to leach to groundwater. Nevertheless, over 83 million pounds of the three major s-triazine herbicides (atrazine, cyanazine, and simazine) were used in the cultivation of corn in the United States alone in 1990 (National agricultural statistics service, 1991). This large scale usage inevitably resulted in contamination of environmental sites such as—agricultural fields, lakes, rivers, sediments and ground water which are subtle living ecosystems and await remediation. The seasonal contamination of the Mississippi river and the Great Lakes Basins in May-July can best illustrate the magnitude of the contamination problem. Contamination of atrazine in these surface waters were reported to sometimes exceed the Maximum Contaminant Levels (MCLs) of 3 µg/L (Nelson and Jones, 1994). It should however be appropriate to mention that the environmental risks associated with these contaminations are by far less dramatic than those associated with chemicals such as DDT, dioxins or PCB’s.
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Mandelbaum, R.T., Shapir, N., Kauffmann, C. (1999). Degradation of Atrazine in Contaminated Sub-Soil and Wastewater by Whole Cells of Pseudomonas sp. Strain ADP and by the Enzyme Atrazine Chlorohydrolase. In: Fass, R., Flashner, Y., Reuveny, S. (eds) Novel Approaches for Bioremediation of Organic Pollution. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4749-5_23
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