Properties and Health Effects

What is atrazine?

Atrazine is the common name for an herbicide that is widely used to kill weeds. It is used mostly on farms. Pure atrazine-an odorless, white powder-is not very volatile, reactive, or flammable. It will dissolve in water. Atrazine is made in the laboratory and does not occur naturally.

Atrazine is used on crops such as sugarcane, corn, pineapples, sorghum, and macadamia nuts, and on evergreen tree farms and for evergreen forest regrowth. It has also been used to keep weeds from growing on both highway and railroad rights-of-way. Atrazine can be sprayed on croplands before crops start growing and after they have emerged from the soil. Some of the trade names of atrazine are Aatrex