Behavior of insecticide chlorpyrifos on soils and sediments with different organic matter content from Provincia de Buenos Aires, República Argentina

Abstract

Buenos Aires Province (República Argentina) has undergone, in the last years, a great increase in agricultural activities based on the incorporation of new technologies and reduction of diversity to meet the increasing food demand. The increase of intensive agricultural systems in Argentina involves the use of fertilizers and pesticides such as herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides. Chlorpyrifos is one of the insecticides most widely used in these crops and constitutes a risk for human health, birds, and aquatic biota such as macroinvertebrates and fishes. In order to assess the possible contamination that the use of this product may represent for the environment, it is necessary to study its interaction with the different types of soils because fate and transport of environmental pollutants may be influenced by their interactions with soil particles. The behavior of chlorpyrifos was analyzed through the study of the recoveries from spiked solid environmental matrices. A strong dependence with organic matter content was observed along with an important dependence with the initial concentrations employed. Here, we show that chlorpyrifos behavior on solid matrices not only depends on soil chemical composition. A significant dependence of recovery percentages with initial concentrations of the pesticide was evident in all cases. Recovery percentages decreased with an increase of the initial concentration employed, no matter the variations in matrices of chemical compositions.