— For Landscaping & Maintenance on all City-Owned Properties —
Today, the Miami Beach City Commission passed a resolution directing the city manager to ban the use of herbicides containing glyphosate by all city employees and contractors in the performance of landscaping and maintenance work on all city-owned properties.
“Glyphosate is a known carcinogen, and I’m pleased my colleagues unanimously agreed that we must eliminate its usage to protect our community,” said Miami Beach Commissioner Ricky Arriola. “As a father, especially, it is extremely important to know that when children are playing on our playgrounds or at our facilities, they are not harmed by this type of chemical”.
In recent months, Monsanto, which manufacturers glyphosate-based weed killers such as Round-up and Ranger Pro, was acquired by Bayer who inherited approximately 8,000 lawsuits in both state and federal courts alleging cancer risks associated with the use of these products. In one recent case, a jury verdict of $289 million (approximately $250 million in punitive damages and $39 million in compensatory damages) was awarded to the plaintiff, a former school groundskeeper dying of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma who used Roundup at work. The plaintiff proved to a jury that exposure to Roundup was a substantial contributing factor to his cancer and that Monsanto failed to warn consumers of the product’s cancer risk.
Additionally, in a March 2015 report, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) concluded that glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup, is “probably carcinogenic in humans.”
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