Spectrophotometric Assessment of Environmental Toxicity of Zineb Fungicide for Sustainability in Agriculture.

Sustainable agriculture aims to meet the food needs of the growing world population while ensuring minimal impact on the environment and humans as well as productivity. Although pesticides represent the backbone of the agri-food sector in its endeavor to secure food production, their application is perceived by many as an obstacle to the achievement of sustainability; the main concerns are linked with their adverse effects on human health and the environment. Management of pesticides can corroborate sustainability in agriculture. The presence of pesticides in surface and groundwater has frequently been detected and has led many workers to carry out experimental studies on pesticide adsorption by soils because such studies could provide important information regarding the prediction of pesticide movement in soil and aquifers. A spectrophotometric method has been developed based on the reaction of the zineb with chloranil. The proposed spectrophotometric method has been applied to the determination of zineb in commercial formulation, grains, fruits, vegetables, and spiked water samples, resulting in high recoveries indicating good accuracy and precision of the method employed. The method has also been validated to study the adsorption of zineb on three Indian soils by using the batch-equilibrium technique. The reaction between zineb and chloranil yielded a yellow-colored product in the solution and was extracted using acrylonitrile which showed maximum absorbance at 415 nm. The relationship between the absorbance and concentration of the fungicide has been established and found to be linear in the range of 1.10-15.45 µgmL − 1 . The leaching potential has been evaluated from adsorption data in terms of Ground Water Ubiquity Score (GUS) and the values obtained in the range 1.34–1.40 which are less than the standard value i.e., 1.8, classifying it as a non-leacher fungicide.