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CalPIP Help/User Guide
Information on Products and Chemicals
A pesticide product is made up of one or more ingredients or chemicals.
A pesticide product contains both "active" and "inert" ingredients or chemicals.
- An active ingredient is one that prevents, destroys, repels or mitigates a pest, or is a plant regulator, defoliant, desiccant or nitrogen stabilizer.
- An inert ingredient is any ingredient in the product that is not intended to affect a target pest. Typical inerts include water, emulsifiers, propellants, soaps, or solvents.
- An active ingredient in one product may be considered an inert ingredient
in another product. For example, isopropyl alcohol may be an active ingredient
and antimicrobial pesticide in some products; however, in other products,
it is used as a solvent and may be considered an inert ingredient.
- The pesticide use reports contain information on active ingredients only.
A chemical ingredient can be used as an active ingredient in many different products.
As an analogy, let’s consider something familiar like cookies. Yummy Baking Company makes two cookies (these would be products): Mom’s Oatmeal Cookie and Dad’s Oatmeal-Chocolate-Chip Cookie. Both products contain oatmeal, eggs, flour, and sugar as ingredients. Let’s assume oatmeal and chocolate chips are "active" ingredients.
- Mom’s Oatmeal Cookie contains one active ingredient, oatmeal.
- Dad’s Oatmeal-Chocolate-Chip Cookie contains two active ingredients: oatmeal and chocolate chips.
- Oatmeal (the active ingredient) is used in more than one cookie (product).
When using CalPIP, searches can be done using the PRODUCT NAME or CHEMICAL NAME selection pages. Searching by product name will return information about all the chemical active ingredients in the products selected. Searching by chemical name will retrieve all products that contain that chemical active ingredient.
Using our Yummy Baking Company analogy, searching for Mom’s Oatmeal Cookie and Dad’s Oatmeal-Chocolate-Chip Cookie on the product selection page whould show results for oatmeal and chocolate chips because both are active ingredients in the products. Searching for oatmeal on the chemical page would show the results for both Mom’s Oatmeal Cookie and Dad’s Oatmeal-Chocolate-Chip Cookie because oatmeal is the active ingredient in both cookies (products). Searching for chocolate chips on the chemical selection page would would show the results only for Dad’s Oatmeal-Chocolate-Chip Cookie.
Version 2023.01 (2021 PUR Data Update)