Safe and Sustainable by Design chemicals and materials

The JRC has published in 2022 a report with the title Safe and Sustainable by Design chemicals and materials

The EU Chemical Strategy for Sustainability (CSS) aims at fostering a transition towards safer and more sustainable chemicals. To ensure this transition, safety and sustainability considerations should be integrated when assessing existing chemicals as well as alternative chemicals that might substitute them. The operationalisation of the Safe and Sustainable-by-Design (SSbD) concept is one of the ambitions of the chemical strategy. There is, therefore, the need to develop a new framework for the definition of criteria for SSbD chemicals and materials. A framework for SSbD requires the integration of risk assessment and safety-based considerations with life cycle-based consideration, to ensure sustainability along the entire value chain. This report aims at reviewing existing frameworks for SSbD, identifying which are the sustainability dimensions included in those framework as well as the parameters, the methods, the models, the tools and the indicators used proposed to address the key issues at stake