Last year, EU companies issued plans to export around 122,000 tonnes of pesticides that are banned from use on the EU’s own farms. That’s one of the main findings from a recent Unearthed and Public Eye investigation, which revealed how the EU’s export trade in banned pesticides has expanded over the past five years, despite promises to end it. 

Now, a new interactive map allows you to explore the data from that investigation in detail, tracing where products are going, and which companies are exporting them. 

To use the map, hover your cursor over the country you are interested in. 

For EU countries, this will bring up arrows showing where the country’s planned exports were intended to go, and a box with summary details. Clicking inside the box will bring up a side panel with tables breaking the data down by active ingredient and exporting companies. If you want still more detail, you can also click a link in this box to download a spreadsheet with the full country-level data. 

For importing countries the map works in a similar way, except that the arrows show which EU countries the imports are coming from.

The data behind this map comes from nearly 2,000 “export notifications” obtained by Unearthed and Public Eye using freedom of information laws, which cover all of the EU’s banned pesticide exports for 2024.

These are documents issued under EU export laws, which prohibit companies from exporting banned and hazardous chemicals without the “prior informed consent” of the importing country. 

A European company planning to export a banned pesticide must send an export notification to the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), informing them of the product’s use, the banned chemicals it contains, and the estimated amount to be shipped that year. The ECHA then sends notifications to the governments of importing countries.

Export notifications are an imperfect record: companies are not required to export the exact amounts set out in the notifications. In some cases they will export more or less, and some exports may not take place at all in a given year.

However, they are also the only publicly held record of banned chemical exports that detail what the chemical will be used for – so they are the most precise paper trail available for the EU’s trade in banned pesticides.

The data shows that the EU’s trade in banned pesticides has expanded since Unearthed and Public Eye’s first investigation of the issue, despite the UK leaving the EU. Prior to Brexit, the UK was by far the EU’s largest exporter of banned pesticides. 

The list of banned pesticides being exported from the UK has also grown in recent years. A recent investigation found that in 2023 the UK exported 8,500 tonnes of banned pesticides, including the toxic weedkillers paraquat and diquat, and the bee-killing “neonicotinoids” thiamethoxam and imidacloprid.