The manufacturer of the pesticides used by the state to fight the light brown apple moth lost its bid to keep secret the ingredients of its products -- a win for environmentalists who are trying to determine whether the pesticides are harmful to the public.
Monterey County Superior Court Judge Robert A. O'Farrell ruled late Tuesday that the manufacturer, Bend, Ore.-based Suterra LLC, had not pursued the proper legal channel and therefore the court had no authority to grant the company its request to keep the ingredients private.
Today, O'Farrell is set to rule on whether to lift a ban on the state's aerial spraying for the moth or keep it in place.
Last week, the judge suspended aerial applications in Monterey County and grounded three state-owned planes, saying he needed more scientific evidence of possible health effects surrounding one of the chemicals in the pesticide, CheckMate OLR-F: polymethylene polyphenyl isocyanate, or PPI.
The state wants to spray a similar pesticide, CheckMate LBAM-F, in Santa Cruz County in early November.
Suterra, which could not be reached for comment Wednesday, had requested that the CheckMate ingredients be kept private so that competitors could not copy them. The request was submitted in connection with the Sept. 24 lawsuit filed by a Monterey environmental group to halt the spraying. But O'Farrell said because Suterra was not directly part of the lawsuit the court could not grant its request.
"This is a victory for open government," said David Dilworth, executive director of Helping Our Peninsula's Environment, or HOPE, the group behind the lawsuit to stop the spraying. "And it's a victory for the public interest. The judge isn't allowing a potentially harmful chemical to be hidden from an independent public analysis."
Some opponents of spraying believes PPI is linked to respiratory problems similar to those reported by nearly 100 Monterey County residents in the wake of last month's spraying there by a trio of state-owned planes, said Dilworth.
State officials and Suterra, however, maintain that the pesticide, as a whole, is mostly water and "practically non-toxic." Independent chemists contacted by the Sentinel generally support the contention that PPI is safe.
The name of the chemical, along with other ingredients in the pesticide, were mistakenly released by the EPA to the Sentinel in late September, setting in motion a series of health studies and legal battles that led to O'Farrell's temporary ban on spraying and his request for more science-based information.
This week, in a separate legal case, a Los Angeles judge denied Suterra a restraining order to prevent the Santa Cruz Sentinel and the Monterey Weekly from publishing the ingredients.
After the Sentinel initially published the ingredients, other papers have done so as well.
Since the disclosure, the EPA has retracted its original information, saying PPI is not in the pesticide used over Monterey County. But it gave no reason for the reversal.
However, court documents submitted to O'Farrell by a chemist with Suterra say that PPI is a "starting material" in CheckMate OLR-F. But, according to the documents, PPI reacts with other chemicals during the manufacturing process to form the shell of the capsule that dispenses the active ingredients. PPI is "not contained in the final formulation," the document reads.
Registered by the EPA in 1997, CheckMate OLR-F replicates the scent of a female moth and throws male moths off course, thus disrupting the mating process to the point where they die off. The moth, a native to Australia, has been known to feed on some 250 crops and 1,000 plants.
The state is warning the public that California's agricultural industry could suffer if an attempt to eradicate the moth isn't undertaken immediately.
Contact Tom Ragan at tragan@santacruzsentinel.com.