Environmental risks of pesticides between forecast and reality: How reliable are results of the environmental risk assessment for individual products in the light of agricultural practice (tank mixtures, spray series)?

In our fields, several plant protection products (PPPs) are often applied at the same time and/or in sequence. In the current authorisation, however, PPPs are only evaluated individually. As a result, effects from typical PPP applications often remain undetected and represent a problematic and alarming gap in the authorisation of PPPs.

The authors of the present study evaluated almost 900 PPP spray series applied in 12 different main crops. The result: The overall risk of PPP applications is underestimated