A bill in the Illinois General Assembly would require certified pesticide users—anyone licensed by the Illinois Department of Agriculture to use Restricted Use pesticides, such as paraquat or fumigant insecticides—to give written or emailed notice at least 24 hours before application at any school, child care facility or park located within 1,500 feet of application that opted to receive them.

According to House Bill 1596, the notice must include the intended location and range of dates and times of application, the common name of each product and the type of pesticide applied, the name and telephone number of the licensed applicator and contact information for IDA for complaints of pesticide misuse.

“This is about making sure that people are aware that these chemicals are being sprayed in proximity,” said state Rep. Laura Faver Dias (D-Grayslake), the lawmaker who proposed the bill. “They can decide how they want to move forward with that information, but I think the first step is awareness that isn’t even happening at all.”

The bill is currently referred to the Rules Committee, after a hearing on April 7 that featured testimony from the Illinois Fertilizer and Chemical Association and the Peoria City/County Health Department. The same committee approved it last spring but it did not get a vote on the House floor. The deadline for this session’s House bills to be passed is May 31.

The notification requirement would apply only to large-scale operations over five acres that use boom sprayers, tractor-mounted sprayers and airplanes to apply weed killers, not residential applications. Penalties would range from $250 for first violations, $500 for second violations and $1,000 for third and subsequent violations.

“It’s a balancing act between making sure that schools, daycares, parks are getting the information that they need, and making sure that it’s not an exorbitant burden on the applicators,” Faver Dias said. The bill has been amended at least twice—once to allow affected parties to opt in to notifications and once to shrink the eligible areas from within half a mile of application to within 1,500 feet of application—to address the concerns of the opposition.

Even with pesticide protection laws like this in place, airborne transmission makes containment incredibly difficult. “Depending on the active ingredients in the products that are used, as well as the weather conditions, pesticide drift can occur over many miles after applications,” said Sara Grantham, science and regulatory manager at Beyond Pesticides, a public health and environmental protection nonprofit.

“The amount of time pesticide residues will persist in plants and soil can vary greatly with each compound,” Grantham said. “Since systemic insecticides are absorbed into a plant’s tissues, they persist within the plant for even longer amounts of time than contact pesticides on the surface of plants.”

In Illinois, pesticide drift is reported through misuse complaints. The IDA reports receiving about 120 pesticide misuse complaints a year, with about more than half involving drift.

Illinois is not the state with the most pesticide-related complaints each year in the Midwest—both Indiana and Missouri have reported more. However, it is one of the states attempting to introduce legislation to provide early warning systems for pesticide application.

Even so, the Illinois Fertilizer and Chemical Association, along with five other organizations, still opposes the bill.

Jean Payne, a volunteer advisory member and former president of IFCA, said the association would decline to comment on the bill until it reaches the House floor, but was concerned that the notice period was too long.

“Weather, especially wind speed, direction and gusts, changes hourly and applicators cannot determine if they can safely apply according to label 24 hours in advance, therefore we cannot make a spray determination 24 hours in advance,” she said.

As of April 16, the strong opposition from industry-related groups has effectively stopped the bill’s progression in the statehouse, according to Tucker Barry, communications director for the Illinois Environmental Council.

“When we negotiate, we try to do it in good faith and meet in the middle for a reasonable solution,” he said. “But we can’t be making all the significant ‘gives.’ We want to pass legislation that protects people.”

Parks Provision Makes Illinois Unique

Nine other states have adopted pesticide drift laws in recent years. What makes Illinois’ bill distinct is a provision for parks within the spray area.

“I don’t know of any other bills that scope public parks and playgrounds within something like this with notification,” said Rika Gopinath, community policy and action manager at Beyond Pesticides.

This vector of exposure was very important to Jen Schroeder, a mother of two who lives in Kansas City, Missouri. Schroeder worked with the city’s parks and recreation department to create outdoor spaces that halt the use of fertilizers, weed killers and insecticides typically used in public parks. She said she did so because she would have liked to know whether the parks she frequented with her children had recently been sprayed with pesticides.

“If that information were readily available, that would have been a key criteria in deciding where to go,” she said.

Iowa also does not have a law regulating the use of pesticides near sensitive areas.

Audrey Tran Lam, the environmental health program director at the University of Northern Iowa, said there haven’t been any recent attempts to introduce or amend current laws to include a buffer zone for pesticide spray in her state. Instead, bills shielding pesticide companies from lawsuits—as long as their product has a federally approved label—are being discussed in the state’s general assembly.

“The spirit of the law in Illinois feels so important, especially given the population it aims to protect,” she said. “Children are exceptionally vulnerable to the impact of these pesticides … But it is critical that their life stage is protected from environmental exposures like pesticides.”

The effects of pesticide drift have also damaged the plants in nearby parks.

Kim Erndt-Pitcher, director of ecological health at the environmental advocacy group Prairie Rivers Network, has been studying pesticide drift for nine years. In that time, she has seen more widespread injury reports involving trees, plants and crops as more commonly used herbicides become more volatile.

“They have really high vapor pressure and they can move off of the plants and soils after they’ve been applied and they can move miles, where they then fall out from the atmosphere and harm non-target plants,” Erndt-Pitcher said.

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A 2022 report by the PRN identified symptoms of growth-regulator herbicide exposure in more than 188 plant species, including trees, shrubs and vines, pointing to evidence of particle and vapor drift and widespread injury across public and private lands.

Additionally, the network reported finding trees, flowers and other plants afflicted by herbicide drift across the state, including in nature preserves, state parks, orchards, schoolyards and town squares. At least one weedkiller was detected in more than 90 percent of the plant tissue samples collected from a variety of settings from 2018 to 2024.

National Information Efforts Continue

In addition to legislation that will warn people about the use of pesticides, some advocates want to build strategic databases to assist their state lawmakers and businesses in passing legislation on the issue and to better forecast economic fortunes, respectively.

In Connecticut, for example, a bill was introduced in February that would require the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection to create a searchable online database to track the types, quantities and locations of pesticides sold or used within the state.

“There’s a lot of energy put toward these types of bills just to raise basic data and information about sales or use,” said Max Sano, senior policy and coalitions associate at Beyond Pesticides. “We don’t have uniform information, necessarily, about how pesticides are interacting with other substances in our environment, even though we know that there are detections there.”

California already has “Spray Days,” an opt-in digital notification system that alerts residents whether a “restricted material” pesticide spray, one with a higher potential to harm humans, is scheduled to be used within the next 24 to 48 hours.

When Spray Days launched last year, the California Farm Bureau told KVPR the notification system could make them targets for protestors and cause delays.

But even though energy has been put into notifications, Sano said more needs to be done to keep people safe.

“All this energy is going into notification, trying to ban some of these uses here and there or in this category,” Sano said, “when we really feel like the existential threat to human health, from a synthetic pesticide and fertilizer too, is it impacts human health, environment and biodiversity—and pollinators, especially.”