by Brianna Crandall — December 19, 2014—In an effort to make pesticide label information easier to find and the approval of pesticide labels more efficient, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is working with pesticide registrants to pilot an electronic label system. Products tested will include landscaping products, mosquito pesticides, and antimicrobials such as hospital disinfectants, among others.
As part of the SmartLabel pilot, nine pesticide registrants will be developing and submitting pesticide labels to EPA through a fully electronic system, instead of as paper or PDF files. One of the goals of the SmartLabel system is to make label information more quickly available to the public in an easily searchable format.
As a fully electronic system, SmartLabel is expected to make the label approval process more efficient by creating standardized label sections for all pesticide labels. The system will also make it easier to compare previous label versions without losing the necessary flexibility to make a label appropriate for each product.
Participants in the voluntary SmartLabel pilot are:
- Bayer CropScience
- Clorox
- Dow AgroSciences
- EcoLab
- Marrone Bio
- Reckitt Benckiser
- SePRO
- Syngenta
- United Industries Corporation
These registrants are testing the following product types:
- Conventional pesticides in agricultural products and/or lawn and garden products
- Microbial and biochemical pesticides in agricultural and/or mosquito larvicidal products
- Antimicrobial pesticides in hospital disinfectant, wood preservative, and/or pool products
The SmartLabel pilot is expected to last about six months, during which time participating registrants will test a number of pesticide product labels that conform to the SmartLabel specifications. EPA is making the documents used in the pilot available online; interested stakeholders are encouraged to comment on these documents. At the end of the pilot, EPA hopes to implement a voluntary SmartLabel system for all registrants.
