Take EU biocides legislation to the next level

Abstract

There is already more than a decade of experiences with environmental risk assessment under the Biocidal Products Regulation (EU) No 528/2012 (BPR). This paper compiles recommendations to improve BPR to ensure that it reaches its goals.Experiences have shown that the processes for environmental risk assessments need to be simplified to allow for faster decisions. Also, despite first BPR environmental benefits, some biocides still enter the environment significantly, and will continue to do so due to their intended uses. Therefore, our suggestions target these two categories: “streamlining environmental risk assessments” and “reducing biocide emissions to the environment”.