A new approach for the exposure assessment of soil organisms to plant protection products (PPPs) has been developed in the new EFSA Guidance Document. The recommended procedure consists of five tiers with different levels of complexity. The first tiers are performed using a new PECsoil calculation model called PERSAM. This work addresses the use of PERSAM in the context of the standard evaluation procedure that regulators have to deal with in their registration activity of both active substance and PPPs. A subset of PPPs authorized at National level has been considered. PECsoil for the selected active substances have been calculated either with PERSAM or with the equations used in the last 20 years; PECsoil has then been compared with the Regulatory Acceptable Concentration (RAC). The percentage of active substances showing an unacceptable risk for each Tier has been calculated, and comparison between the current assessment and the new one is presented together with some considerations on the efficacy, reliability and usefulness of all the PERSAM tiers. The influence of degradation between the applications in PECsoil results has also been evaluated.
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