WEB EXCLUSIVE: Inside the EPA’s PESP

By: Daniel Jacobs

Fischer Environmental reveals steps to meet PESP requirements, Bug Off Pest Control becomes first PESP certified distributor

The Pesticide Environmental Stewardship Program (PESP), created in 1994, is an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) program that lets the organization partner with the pesticide-user community to promote Integrated Pest Management (IPM) practices. Bob Kunst and Fischer Environmental joined the program in late 1990s and became a member in 2001.

Inside PESP
According to the EPA website, PESP’s mission is “to reduce pesticide risk in both agricultural and non-agricultural settings through public-private partnerships that promote IPM.”

Established in 1994, PESP is a voluntary membership grants program that works with the nation’s pesticide-user community to reduce human health and environmental risks associated with pesticide use. PESP and its sub-initiatives promote the adoption of innovative, alternative pest control practices such as IPM.

PESP is guided by the principle that voluntary programs complement the standards and decisions established by regulatory and registration actions. The informed actions of pesticide users can further reduce the risks from pests and pesticides by playing a major role in ensuring human health and environmental safety.

Fischer Environmental’s plan to meet the PESP mission include:

1. Reduction or elimination of all broadcast applications in favor of targeted, precise applications.
2. Targeting residential structures for environmental modification.
3. Increasing customer awareness of integrated pest management concepts.
4. Increasing technician training in exclusionary practices.
5. Eliminating the use of any chemical with a higher than “caution” label.
6. Instituting its new program of achieving a 50% reduction in “caution” label use by going to essential plant oil formulations, which fall under the “generally regarded as safe” (GRAS) category.

Making the Grade
For Andy Linares, the hard part wasn’t adopting the techniques and processes associated with integrated pest management (IPM). He’d been teaching those for years in his training programs. No, the challenge for the president of New York City-based Bug Off Pest Control Center was to convince the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that a distributor belonged in the Pesticide Environmental Stewardship Program (PESP).

“The program itself is not a complicated means by which a company can get its green bona fides,” Linares says “That you can be listed on a roster by the federal government carries a lot of weight. It lends a lot of credibility if you present yourself as a green company.”

Linares applied to become a PESP member in January 2009, but he experienced some hesitation on the part of the EPA. The agency, he says, was skeptical of including a distributor among its many application members.

It was Bug Off’s long history of training the industry in IPM techniques that ultimately swayed the EPA.

“It gives us more legitimacy and credibility when we say we’re committed to IPM techniques,” Linares says. “It helps people on the fence about coming to our programs. Those are people who’ve never had any exposure to us. It is a confirmation and affirmation of the work we’ve been doing all along.”

You can reach Jacobs, managing editor of PMP magazine, at djacobs@questex.com.