New Approach to Fulfill Art 8 of Directive 2009/128: a Risk Assessment Procedure for Pesticide Application Equipment

All pesticide application equipment in professional use shall be subject to inspections at regular intervals according to the EU Directive 2009/128/EC on the sustainable use of pesticides. Article 8.3 allows the Member States to derogate from the mandatory inspection at regular intervals or to apply different timetables and inspection intervals for certain types of pesticide application equipment based on a risk assessment for human health and environment and an assessment of the scale of use. In order to fulfill Article 8.3, a risk assessment protocol was developed in Belgium within the framework of the SIRA-APESTICON project. It is then applied on the Belgian equipment in use. Therefore, risk is evaluated for the human health and the environment. The assessment is based on technical parameters subject to inspections, their occurrences and severities, but also on national scale of use of the PAE types. Results are expressed at different scale levels: the defect, the machine and the country. They also can be used to help in elaboration of new inspection protocols. This new procedure offers guidelines about the necessity to carry out an inspection of every PAE in use.