User Areas:

• Home
• Databases
• Applicant advice
• Farmers & growers
• Amenity users
• Home garden
• Food industry
• Biopesticides
• Advisory groups
• Biocides
• Reach

HSE is not responsible for the content of external websites.

You are in: Home » Pesticide Approvals » EU » EC Reviews » Withdrawn Garden Pesticides and the EC Review

Withdrawn Garden Pesticides and the EC Review

This page explains why pesticide products may be withdrawn from the market. It also describes the European Community (EC) pesticides review programme and its effect on the withdrawal of pesticides.

Reasons For the Withdrawal of Pesticide Products

Garden pesticide products may be withdrawn from the market for a number of reasons, most of which do not concern safety:

• A pesticide company may decide to take an unprofitable product off the market, or to replace an old product with a new improved product
• When a company changes name, for instance after a merger, the company will need new registrations. Products with the previous company name will then be withdrawn
• A pesticide company decides not to support the active substance through the review. This often happens if the pesticide is old and there are already more modern pesticides on the market, or because sales of the pesticide have fallen. It would not make sense for a company to spend a large amount of money supporting an active substance in the review if they could not get this back through sales of the pesticide.
• A pesticide company supports the active substance through the review by providing data, but after consideration of the data the decision by the EC is that it should be withdrawn from the market for safety reasons.

EC Review Programme

The EC review programme is almost complete and was designed to make sure that all the chemicals used as 'active substances' in pesticides meet the most up-to-date standards of human and environmental safety. The review programme was split into four stages and began in 1996. Each stage had a different deadline for companies to say whether they wanted to support their active substance through the review process. If companies chose to support their active substance, there was a second deadline for them to provide all the necessary data. Many active substances have been withdrawn, mainly because companies chose not to support them through the EC review.

Timetable for withdrawn pesticides

The timetable for withdrawals can vary, but in most cases six months are given for existing stocks to be sold and another twelve months (making 18 months in total) for gardeners to use up pesticide products. If pesticides are not supported in the EC review programme as described above, then many products can be withdrawn from the market at the same time. If a pesticide was supported through the review, but failed to meet EC standards then the timetable for withdrawal will depend on the date a particular decision is taken by the EC.

Withdrawn products do not generally raise serious safety concerns and the best way to dispose of them is to use them up according to the label instructions. If there was a particular safety concern about any product, we would issue special advice on how to dispose of it.