Marysville Appeal-Democrat

Feds accuse ebay of illegally peddling poisons, emissions-control defeaters

- Tribune News Service The Mercury News

The U.S. Department of Justice is accusing e-commerce giant ebay of illegally selling tens of thousands of banned and restricted pesticides, and allowing such sales to continue even after it was ordered to stop.

In a lawsuit filed last week, prosecutor­s also claim ebay broke additional federal laws by selling devices used to bypass vehicle emissions controls, and thousands of items containing the deadly solvent methylene chloride, which is linked to increased risk for several types of cancer.

“Some of these products cause motor vehicles to emit … massive amounts of air pollution,” the lawsuit alleges. “Others pose an imminent, and in some cases potentiall­y lethal, danger to human beings. ebay has the power, the authority, and the resources to stop the sale of these illegal, harmful products on its website. It has chosen not to.”

San Jose’s ebay, which connects vendors with buyers and takes pricebased sales fees, said

Friday that the Justice Department’s “actions are entirely unpreceden­ted and ebay intends to vigorously defend itself.”

According to the lawsuit filed Wednesday by the Justice Department on behalf of the U.S. Environmen­tal Protection Agency in New York federal court, the EPA contacted ebay in 2017 about listings on its platform for unregister­ed, misbranded or restricted-use pesticides. The agency asked for informatio­n on how ebay was addressing sales that were not compliant with the federal act governing pesticides, but the company said it was not subject to that act, the lawsuit claims.

In June 2020, the EPA ordered ebay to stop selling certain pesticides, but the company continued offering “numerous” unregister­ed, misbranded or restricted-use products, including some named in the order, the lawsuit alleges. Despite a second order in July 2021, ebay continued listing such pesticides, as recently as July 28 of this year, the lawsuit claims. The company illegally sold at least 23,000 pesticide items since 2016, the lawsuit alleges.

The Justice Department also alleges that ebay offered or sold more than 343,000 devices for bypassing mandatory vehicle-emissions controls between January 2017 and September 2020.

The products, which can cost $1,000, significan­tly increase pollution that harms public health by increasing emissions of hazardous particulat­e up to 37 times and boosting output of other dangerous compounds up to 1,000 times, according to the lawsuit.

Such “defeat devices” have been the target of recent enforcemen­t actions. The EPA in 2020 reported that more than 500,000 diesel pickup trucks in the United States had such units installed.

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United States