In the playgrounds of Alto Adige, among the swings and slides, in the grass where children run, fall, touch and put their hands in their mouths, residues of Fluazinam have been found: a fungicide with a toxicological history that is anything but reassuring, classified as a persistent substance in the environment, in short, one of those substances which, once they enter the ecosystem, never really disappear.
The news comes from Naz-Sciaves, a municipality in the Isarco Valley in the province of Bolzano, where grass samples taken from the playgrounds of Fiumes and Natz-Hintersun showed concentrations of Fluazinam equal to 0.023 mg/kg and 0.015 mg/kg respectively. PAN Europe, the European Pesticide Action Network, put those numbers into perspective by comparing them with the maximum residue limit (MRL) set for lettuce, which is set at 0.01 mg/kg: in both cases, the value was exceeded.
What is Fluazinam
Fluazinam is a fungicide widely used in intensive agriculture, particularly in orchards. In Alto Adige, the land of apples par excellence, it is used on a large scale during the treatment season. The problem is that it doesn’t stop where it’s sprayed.
Monitoring data from the APPA (Provincial Environment Agency) show that, in the stations of Silandro, Naturno, Laives and other areas with a high density of orchards, residues of Fluazinam — together with other fungicides such as Captano and Boscalid — are present in the air for consecutive weeks during the treatment season. Low but continuous, widespread concentrations, in an almost total regulatory vacuum, there are in fact no specific limits for the presence of these compounds in the air, and studies on the chronic exposure of resident populations are still very few.
But the truly worrying fact does not just concern the quantity. It concerns the chemical nature of the substance.
What the experts say
The Bürgerliste of Naz-Sciaves – the civic group that has been denouncing the contamination of local playgrounds for years – as reported Balance, collected the opinions of three international researchers from Austria, Switzerland and Germany. What emerges is not a simple environmentalist alarm but a systematic criticism of the approach of the South Tyrolean health authorities.
Johann Zaller, professor at the University of Vienna, is directed:
Regarding Fluazinam I found a whole series of serious health risks: it can harm the baby in the womb, cause skin allergies, has acute inhalation toxicity, has serious effects on groundwater and is very toxic to aquatic organisms with long-term effects.
But there is another point that worries Zaller:
Fluazinam is a permanent chemical and so is the degradation product TFA. TFA are considered reproductive toxicants and hormonally active.
In other words: Even when Fluazinam “degrades” in the environment, what it leaves behind — trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) — is also a “forever chemical“, that is, it is not eliminated but accumulates in the soil, in water, in plants. And it acts as an endocrine disruptor, i.e. a substance capable of altering the hormonal system even at very low doses.
It is here that Zaller introduces perhaps the most disruptive element of the entire debate: “For hormonal effects the limit values are irrelevant.” For endocrine disruptors, therefore, the classic toxicological approach — “the dose makes the poison” — may simply not work.
Caroline Linhart, environmental epidemiologist at the University of Neuchâtel, knows this area well. She is one of the authors of the study “Year-round pesticide contamination of public sites near intensively managed agricultural areas in South Tyrol“, published on Environmental Sciences Europewhich in 2021 had already systematically documented the presence of pesticides in South Tyrolean playgrounds in all seasons of the year, not just in spring, when treatments are more intense.
That study had analyzed 96 grass samples collected in 24 public sites (19 playgrounds, 4 schoolyards and a market) distributed in various areas of the province of Bolzano. The result was unequivocal: 96% of the sites were contaminated with at least one pesticide residue, and in 79% of cases multiple residues were present. Fluazinam was among the most recurring active ingredients, with concentrations that in some cases were up to 24 times higher than the maximum limit allowed for foods.
Today Linhart is even more explicit:
Fluazinam is an active ingredient with a problematic risk classification and precisely in playgrounds, i.e. in places frequented by particularly sensitive groups of the population, the discovery of a similar substance requires explanations from a precautionary point of view.
The researcher underlines that the population has the right to know why a substance with these characteristics is repeatedly detected in places frequented by children.
Then there is the last expert consulted, Peter Clausing, a German toxicologist, who comes directly into conflict with the South Tyrolean health authorities. The latter had tried to reassure public opinion with toxicological calculations: the values found are low, the quantity that a child could actually ingest is minimal, there is no acute risk.
Clausing rejects this approach decisively:
The health authority should stop playing these calculation games. These calculations do not take into account possible multiple residues, different routes of exposure, repeated exposures – especially through the respiratory tract – and the particular sensitivity of children.
A child playing in a park breathes, touches surfaces, puts his hands in his mouth, rolls on the grass. Exposure does not occur through a single route, but through multiple simultaneous channels. And in that grass, as years of research has documented, there is never just one pesticide: there are cocktails of substances that interact with each other in ways that science has not yet fully understood.
The positions remain distant: on the one hand the approach of the health authorities, which is based on thresholds and risk assessments linked to individual exposures; on the other, that of part of the scientific community, which draws attention to the effects of repeated exposures over time and to the particular sensitivity of children.
They are two almost incompatible languages. But the stakes are the same: the health of those who play on that lawn.
