Abandoning harmful technologies and associated practices generating various types of risks is a considerable challenge. It supposes to address the discontinuation of socio-technical systems as a new class of governance problem. The phase-out of large socio-technical systems calls for the joint consideration of systemic structuration and the temporalities of socio-technical transformations. Phasing-out of a toxic world conjures up an overlay of different forms of risk, which requires new takes on the scales, temporalities, politics and uncertainties involved, as well as new conceptions of risks and how they can be handled. Focusing specifically on the removal of pesticides use from agriculture in France (1945–present), this chapter seeks to understand how injunctions to emancipate from dependence to harmful systems have been processed within society. Understanding the successive attempts to ban, reduce or phase-out pesticides request to appreciate the emergence of framings and their translations in a longitudinal analysis. We propose to consider the socio-historical conditions that can explain their (un)felicitous development in three phases of designating and problematizing pesticides: (1) as dangerous substance, (2) as object of reduction and removal, (3) as socio-political risk. We propose a retrospective exploration of the conditions of unveiling pesticide uses at a systemic level to issue the existence of a socio-political risk of not fulling the promise of opening a new era for agri-food systems. Phasing-out pesticides, like dealing with other kinds of persistent systemic issues, appears as if imbued with a still currently unbearable heaviness. Confronted with what appears as the impossible task of phasing-out undesirable (risky) systems while ensuring that such (risky) ends are not undesired, it becomes clear that what is needed is an appropriate framing of the new kinds of socio-political risks that are associated with effective phase-out governance.