Environmental risk assessment scheme for plant protection products

Abstract

This standard provides an assessment of the direct risk presented by plant protection products to terrestrial vertebrates (birds and mammals), when applied as sprays, seed treatments or granular formulations. Specific approval and amendmentFirst approved in 1992-09. Edited as and EPPO Standard in 1998. Revision approved in 2002-09. IntroductionAdverse effects on birds and mammals are among the factors which most strongly influence the acceptability of a plant protection product. The greatest concern is effects at the population level. However, there is also strong public concern regarding the deaths of individual birds and mammals from the use of plant protection products, although they may not have any significant effect on the population. Partly for that reason, and because of the lack of agreed criteria for the acceptability of effects at the population level, this subscheme is concerned with the risk to individual animals. The result can also be used to provide an indication of the potential impact at the population level. ScopeThe scope of the risk assessment subscheme covered in this Chapter is the determination of direct risk of a plant protection product to non-target birds and mammals. The direct risk is defined as the risk from the product itself including exposure via treated or contaminated food. The subscheme determines the risk from primary and secondary exposure, where primary exposure is defined as direct consumption of product or of treated food, and secondary exposure is defined as consumption of food that, although not directly treated, contains the active substance (e.g. bioaccumulation in fish).Exposure by non-dietary routes is not considered by this subscheme. There is some evidence that non-dietary routes can contribute significantly to exposure in some situations (Driver et al ., 1991;Mineau et al ., 2001), but there is no generally accepted approach to assessing them and in practice they are frequently omitted from routine assessment. It would be advisable to consider assessing non-dietary routes, especially in those cases where the level of risk from dietary exposure alone is approaching an unacceptable level. Approaches to assessing non-dietary routes have not developed significantly since the previous edition of this subscheme (OEPP/EPPO, 1994) and the user is referred to that source for guidance.For some specialized products, e.g. slug pellets or rodenticides, the assessment requires some extra considerations. However, the basic concept of risk assessment is the same (processing of toxicity data, definitions of exposure-toxicity ratio, ETR). Such cases can be assessed by taking one of the modules of the subscheme (for sprayed products and seed treatments or for granular formulations) as a model and deciding on:• suitable indicator species • relevance of the three time scales • exposure model for reasonable worst-case and most likely case scenarios. With regard to rodenticides some background information is provided in Note 26.The risk assessment is done at the field scale and not lan...