Talk:Glyphosate

Merge with Glyphosate-based herbicides

I propose merging Glyphosate-based herbicides into Glyphosate. The two pages have a total overlap and maintaining both is extremely challenging. Glyphosate Herbicides are the main use of Glyphosate so a sub-section there would suffice plus merging most of the rest. We also have Roundup (herbicide) that can accomodate some specific content on that specific product (although it should probably be merged as well as Roundup=Main Glyphosate-based herbicide=Glyphosate in a bottle). {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  ^talk 14:24, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

• Merge – see reasoning above {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  ^talk 14:33, 28 December 2023 (UTC)
• Would make more sense to merge Roundup with Glyphosate-based herbicides. Glyphosate per se is just a chemical, and the article shouldn't be contaminated with all the branded herbicide noise. Bon courage (talk) 14:46, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

  Glyphosate is a chemical that was invented by a company for specific use as an herbicide. It is not a "just a chemical". This article can't avoid covering that fact. We have some pages that drill down into the details of what I assume you are referring to as "noise" such as Monsanto legal cases and Roundup (herbicide) that should be linked from this article. {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  ^talk 17:39, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

• Don't merge as proposed. The whole premise of originally splitting out formulation/brand topics like Roundup (herbicide) was to keep this article on the active ingredient focused, and the proposed merge would cause issues there. There was an RfC awhile back that has been revisited a few times over the years that resulted in the formulation search terms like Roundup or Glyphosate-based herbicides not redirecting back to this page. There's a lot of history to unpack on the topic splits.

I agree with Bon Courage that if a merge was going to happen, this article should remain as-is and to instead merge Roundup (herbicide) → Glyphosate-based herbicides. Roundup is just one of many brands now with all the generics out there and being off-patent for around 30 years, and the owners of that brand aren't even the dominant producers of glyphosate anymore. Ironically, the more generalized title Glyphosate-based herbicides that is being proposed to be merged here would have more staying power and feasibility to navigate what was discussed at the RfC than Roundup (herbicide). KoA (talk) 16:15, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose merge as opposed. I agree with Bon Courage and KoA above, and I agree that, if anything were to be merged, it should be between those other two articles. (I'd have to think some more about which would be the merge target in that case, but it's not the question here.) KoA points to a previous RfC, and I'll point to earlier, archived discussions where this has already been discussed to death: Talk:Glyphosate/Archive 13#Glyphosate is not synonymous with RoundUp; RoundUp deserves and needs its own page and Talk:Glyphosate/Archive 15#Glyphosate-based herbicides. I feel like I've been needing to say this over and over, but there are two things: glyphosate as a chemical compound, with its properties and uses, and Roundup and related products, which are commercial products that contain this molecule. We have previously gone through so much discussion, ending with clear consensus to treat these two things as two separate topics, on separate pages, and I'm not seeing anything in the recent source material that would make us want to reconsider. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:22, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

  Roundup is simply glyphosate in a bottle with a surfactant. Glyphosate is the one and only active ingredient. The primary difference among the many available glyphosate products is the surfactant mixture found in the formulated product. Surfactants enhance the retention and absorption of glyphosate by plants contacted by the spray solution.[[1]]. You basically just change the color of the box and the wrapping but it is always just glyphosate. {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  ^talk 10:11, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

  I'm getting tired of having to keep repeating myself, but glyphosate as a chemical compound, and glyphosate sold in a bottle with surfactants and any other ingredients, with a company label on the bottle, are two different things, and the longstanding consensus has been that there should be separate pages for each of them, because each of them involves enough specific content that a single page would be overloaded. Given that you are being so insistent on longstanding consensus in the section above, you might want to pay similar attention to the consensus here. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:32, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

  Roundup is sometimes glyphosate without surfactant (e.g., aquatic solutions where terrestrial formulations aren't allowed to be used due to non-target effects), but Roundup is also sometimes without glyphosate as bottles of vinegar[2], dicamba[3], etc.[4] Glyphosate though, is not definitively the one and only active ingredient.

  In the US at least, each formulation is something the registrant has to get label approval from the EPA on, and there's a lot going on on the regulatory side between active ingredient and the final EPA-approved product. It's never something as simple as just "changing the wrapping", and that's what past discussions have had to work with related to redirects, merges, etc., so we do need to be careful we are getting fundamentals right when discussing these subjects. KoA (talk) 22:06, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

  I think this is the problem. RoundUp is a brand name that refers to multiple products that have only one thing in common: they contain Glyphosate. Our page is unclear about that and hence the problem. I am not sure the specific brand name "RoundUp" should have an article at all. RoundUp=Glyphosate based herbicides(GBH) for sure. And I'm not sure what the advantage is of separating Glyphosate and GBH since Glyphosate is only used for that purpose. {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  ^talk 10:18, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

  RoundUp is a brand name that refers to multiple products that have only one thing in common: they contain Glyphosate. No pages say that because in addition to what Tryptofish said, that statement is objectively not accurate as already discussed, even in my comment you are replying to. Repeating the claim does not make it any truer. That is why everyone else has been discussing how the formulations and different active ingredients make targeting/merges more complicated than depicted. KoA (talk) 16:26, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

  that statement is objectively not accurate what evidence do you have of this? Bayer says: glyphosate, the active ingredient in most Roundup® brand herbicides and other weed-control products.[5]. The only reason they say "most" is due to the ongoing litigation: To further reduce future litigation risk, we have transitioned the manufacturing of our glyphosate products for the U.S. residential L&G market to new formulations that have different active ingredients.[6]. In the rest of the world Bayer is very clear that Roundup is Glyphosate with surfactants: Roundup is the total systemic foliar herbicide, the combination of the active ingredient (glyphosate), in its salified form, with surfactants and inert agents specific for each type of formulation, available in 3 different formulations translated from Bayer's Italian Website [7] {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  ^talk 23:51, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

  Your question had already been answered, repeatedly, including in sources you are citing. It's been about 7 years now that Roundup≠glyphosate, so this isn't anything particularly new. KoA (talk) 17:29, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

  Our Roundup article states The main active ingredient of Roundup is the isopropylamine salt of glyphosate. Another ingredient of Roundup is the surfactant POEA (polyethoxylated tallow amine). Only a small subset of production and only in the US is not glyphosate based. And that specific production was specifically created to try and limit glyphosate litigation. If "Roundup≠glyphosate" was true the Roundup page would not exist as it would just be a generic herbicide brand with nothing notable about it. In any case: this merge proposal is about the Glyphosate and the Glyphosate-based herbicides articles. {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  ^talk 17:24, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose In the not-so-distant past we had only the glyphosate article and IIRC, the Glyphosate-based herbicides was created due to the difficulties of dealing with differences in toxicity between glyphosate vs glyphosate + surfactants. I agree with KoA and Tryptofish, that unless the previous discussions have been examined and arguments presented about why they reached the incorrect conclusion, there is no reason to revisit this. (I am also more sympathetic for towards merging Roundup into GBH and creating Roundup (brand) to deal with the fact that many consumer formulations of roundup no longer contain glyphosate, but this isn't the place to discuss that). SmartSE (talk) 11:32, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
• Comment - This article does have significant overlap with both Glyphosate-based herbicides and Roundup (herbicide). This article is also long at over 8k words (see WP:SIZERULE), and a merge would make it longer. On length alone, merging more content in is suboptimal. A restructuring of these three articles could be done gradually that would reduce redundancy. Article overlap is understandable, given that (1)Glyphosate's only significant commercial and scientific application is as an herbicide, and (2) almost all references that discuss Roundup in detail also mention glyphosate. Condensing the lawsuit section here is a first step towards reducing overlap. Sections in each of these articles could likely be reduced in a similar manner as long as key points are mentioned and relevant sections of other articles are linked.Dialectric (talk) 18:43, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

  Most of the content is basically a duplication. So we don't need to keep everything twice. I think we should try to only keep the unique content to avoid repetitions and just keep one final page. {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  ^talk 09:42, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

  @Dialectric I've analysed more in depth this point and I think a single section covering "Glyphosate based herbicides" would need to be added to this article with content from "Inert ingredients" (and maybe a general intro sentence from "Background") which is one of the few non duplicated sections of that article. Everything else is basically only about Glyphosate and not specific to GBHs. {{u|Gtoffoletto}}  ^talk 17:31, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Neuro toxcity

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9101768/

Abstract

Glyphosate, a non-selective systemic biocide with broad-spectrum activity, is the most widely used herbicide in the world. It can persist in the environment for days or months, and its intensive and large-scale use can constitute a major environmental and health problem. In this systematic review, we investigate the current state of our knowledge related to the effects of this pesticide on the nervous system of various animal species and humans. The information provided indicates that exposure to glyphosate or its commercial formulations induces several neurotoxic effects. It has been shown that exposure to this pesticide during the early stages of life can seriously affect normal cell development by deregulating some of the signaling pathways involved in this process, leading to alterations in differentiation, neuronal growth, and myelination. Glyphosate also seems to exert a significant toxic effect on neurotransmission and to induce oxidative stress, neuroinflammation and mitochondrial dysfunction, processes that lead to neuronal death due to autophagy, necrosis, or apoptosis, as well as the appearance of behavioral and motor disorders. The doses of glyphosate that produce these neurotoxic effects vary widely but are lower than the limits set by regulatory agencies. Although there are important discrepancies between the analyzed findings, it is unequivocal that exposure to glyphosate produces important alterations in the structure and function of the nervous system of humans, rodents, fish, and invertebrates. 172.58.56.248 (talk) 01:12, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

MDPI predatory pay to publish journal. The International Journal of Molecular Science is an especially bad one, it seems. Since 2023, the journal has published over 11,000 papers. With 2023 alone having 24 issues of the journal with hundreds of papers in each issue. Add to that that the authors of this paper seem to almost exclusively publish papers on glyphosate and neonicotinoids and that they use multiple studies from discredited scientist Gilles-Éric Séralini and this isn't looking like much of an actual credible systematic review. Silverseren^C 01:32, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

+1

Besides, EFSA > other older metareviews.

Acc. to EFSA (Part 3, p 188): No issues, even the NOAEL are high: "The NOAEL for systemic toxicity is 395 mg/kg bw per day in males, based on reduced BWG and food consumption in the 90-day neurotoxicity study in rat (Report No. 2060-0010); in the absence of neurotoxicity findings, the NOAEL for sub-chronic neurotoxicity is confirmed to be ≥ 1499 mg/kg bw per day in males. This is in line with the conclusion reached in Report No. (additional 90-day neurotoxicity study in rats)." --Julius Senegal (talk) 12:01, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Inaccurate sentence

Stauffer Chemical patented the agent as a chemical chelator - the source listed does not support that claim see also https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6132386/ 156.146.156.168 (talk) 19:16, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for catching that mistake. I made this edit, to correct it: [8]. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:15, 15 March 2024 (UTC)