SSbD Knowledge Sharing Portal

Introduction to Safe and Sustainably by Design (SSbD)

Welcome to the PARC Knowledge Sharing Portal on Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD)!

Here, you will find information on SSbD including guidance, tools, educational resources, and more. You can also exchange insights and share knowledge through the SSbD discussion group on PARCopedia ↗.

What is SSbD?

Safe and Sustainably by Design (SSbD) is a voluntary pre-market approach to guide manufacturers, producers, and innovators in the development of safe and sustainable chemicals, materials, processes, and products. It assists to identify and minimise the impacts concerning safety for humans and the environment, and for sustainability, taking a lifecycle perspective. It helps innovators to steer to a green and sustainable transition by integrating safety and sustainability considerations into the design and development of products, processes, or technologies from the early stage of innovation.

SSbD is considered as one of the key aspects of the EU’s Chemical Strategy for Sustainability towards a toxic-free environment ↗ (CSS) of the European Green Deal ↗. Actions on SSbD announced in the EC CSS include besides others, the development of a SSbD framework for the definition of criteria and evaluation procedure for chemicals, materials, and products. With regard to current EU policy initiatives such as the Clean Industrial Deal ↗ that focus on competitiveness and innovation power of the EU industry, SSbD offers an important element as it aims to guide and foster innovation in a way that supports competitiveness as well as innovation towards safe and sustainable solutions.

SSbD in a nutshell: A short video explaining SSbD in a nutshell developed by SUSNANOFAB is available at the webpage of the EU IRISS project ↗.

The SSbD background and motivation

Our society is facing global challenges including man-made climate change, the increasing loss of biodiversity and resources as well as increasing chemical pollution that threaten the environment and human existence. Production and use of chemicals are rapidly growing. As mentioned in the second edition of the Global Chemicals Outlook GCO-II ↗ , production capacity and sales in the chemical industry are doubling every 15 years. At the same time, the diversity of chemicals and the spread of their uses and combinations of them are also increasing and are likely to outstrip our ability to monitor, assess and mitigate their risks. Against this background, concepts for sustainable development are needed (WCED, 1997 ↗). To meet current and future generation’s needs, any development must remain within the ecological limits within which human beings can operate while maintaining a stable and resilient planet Earth.

These planetary boundaries ↗ represent a set of critical environmental thresholds that, if crossed, could lead to detrimental consequences for the global environment and, subsequently, for human well-being. “Novel entities/chemical pollution” is one of the areas with critical boundaries that have been crossed. It is therefore essential to manage the production, use, release, exposure and end-of-life fate of chemicals and other entities to lower the planetary burden. This challenge requires, on the one hand, the realisation of sustainable chemistry ↗ to promote responsible and balanced practices within the chemical industry. This includes reducing the amount of chemicals used, finding safer and more sustainable alternatives (including non-chemical ones), and simplifying the diversity of chemicals used to support recycling and thus a circular economy. In addition, green chemistry ↗, which focuses on the design and development of products and processes that minimise the use and generation of hazardous substances, is becoming relevant to address the challenge of global chemical pollution. In the recent years, safe(r)-by-design ↗ approaches have come into play, mainly to support the inclusion of safety considerations into the design and development of nanomaterials. The aim of safe(r)-by-design is to proactively identify and mitigate potential hazards, reduce risks, and improve overall safety performance at early stages of innovation. The SSbD concept - which builds on the safe(r)-by-design concepts - involves the integration of human and environmental safety considerations with sustainability impacts (environmental, social and economic dimensions), and circularity throughout the life cycle of chemicals, materials, processes and products. It considers raw material extraction, manufacturing, distribution, use, and end-of-life disposal or recycling. It seeks to balance human and environmental safety with economic, environmental, and social sustainability considerations in the design and development of products and processes. By this, SSbD intends to support environmental health, human well-being, and the long-term ecological balance needed to stay within the planetary boundaries.

The different key principles and underpinning approaches clearly demonstrate the need for different levels of expertise, multidisciplinary knowledge and a new understanding of innovation, which implies rethinking and recognising safety and sustainability aspects as integral parts of innovation, to enable the transition to SSbD chemicals, materials, processes, and products.

A successful transition to SSbD chemicals, materials, processes, and products can support several of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals ↗ (SDGs), as defined in the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This include SDG 3 Good Health and Wellbeing, which aims to reduce the number of illnesses and death due to hazardous chemicals and pollution and contamination (target 3.9); SDG 12 Sustainable Consumption and Production Target with regard to manage chemicals in an environmentally sound manner and significantly reduce releases to the environment (target 12.4); and SDG 6 Water Quality Target with regard to improving water quality by reducing pollution dumping and minimising release of hazardous chemicals and materials and by increasing recycling and safe reuse (target 6.3).

The European Commission's SSbD framework

To enable this transition, the Joint Research Centre has developed the EC SSbD framework for the definition of criteria and evaluation of procedures for chemicals, materials, processes and products, which is proposed to be established in research and innovation activities by the European Commission Recommendation of 8 December 2022 ↗. The EC SSbD framework aims to support and guide research and innovation activities in the development of new chemicals/materials, processes and products. And it represents a new way of thinking, taking a holistic view of the safety and sustainability of chemicals and materials, from the early stages of innovation and with a full life cycle perspective, including the end-of-life.

The main components of the framework - the (re)design and the assessment - are applied in an integrative and iterative way as data becomes available.

In the (re)design phase, guiding principles are applied to steer the development of new chemicals, materials, processes and products while including safety and sustainability considerations. The (re)design can be at the molecular, process and/or product level.

The SSbD assessment of the framework includes five steps:

Step 1 - Hazard assessment of the chemical/material
Step 2 - Human health and safety aspects in the chemical/material production and processing phase
Step 3 - Human health and environmental aspects in the final application phase
Step 4 - Environmental sustainability assessment
Step 5 - Social and economic sustainability assessment

The framework proposed in the Commission Recommendation and presented in the JRC technical report underwent an extensive testing phase, after which a revision of the framework is intended. During this testing phase, industry, member states, academia and RTOs were invited to test the framework and provide feedback for its revision. Information on the testing phase, timetable, workshop and other events can be found on the dedicated SSbD website of the European Commission ↗.

What is needed to operationalise SSbD?

The development of SSbD chemicals and materials requires not only a change of mindset towards innovation and the pre-regulatory implementation of safety and sustainability considerations. It also requires multidisciplinary expertise, a network of professionals covering all the required skills, and a future generation of SSbD experts. Education and training are needed to provide the necessary skills to both professionals and students in the relevant disciplines, e.g. chemistry, physics, engineering, materials science, environmental science.

The EU SSbD framework proposes a set of criteria at each step to assess whether the chemical/material under investigation can be considered safe or sustainable, respectively. To address these criteria in a reliable and reproducible way, agreed methods, models and tools are needed to allow a harmonised application of the framework and thus a comparison of outcomes. Various tools are available that address safety, sustainability, SSbD or aspects of these and can thus be used to support the operationalisation of the EC SSbD framework. PARC is developing a “toolbox ↗” which provides a structured collection of tools to address the different steps of the EU SSbD framework in an appropriate and reliable way and guides the user through the assessment process.

At the beginning of the development of a (new) chemical or material, information on safety and sustainability will be limited and will increase as the innovation matures. Thus, different methods to collect data will be relevant for different innovation stages. Simple models using a set of default values and assumptions are needed. Screening and high throughput methods could help to generate initial data on new chemicals and materials at early stages of innovation. Thus, the development of models and methods, in particular, of new approach methods (NAMs) will be needed to support SSbD assessments. At latest for market entry stage, safety information is needed that has been collected using regulatory accepted OECD Test Guidelines. Read more about the test methods here. In this context, the curation of existing safety and sustainability data is also a way forward to apply the criteria and procedures of the EC SSbD framework. Here, FAIR data are of utmost importance.

Training and guidance will help to inform users on how to apply the SSbD framework. Such guidance should include advice on how to frame the actual use case, how to use the tools to cover the criteria, how to collect relevant data and how to make the overall assessment on safety and sustainability. A methodological guidance ↗ has been developed by the JRC which includes guidance on how to perform a scoping analysis to define the system and the boundaries of the assessment. It also addresses specific aspects of the steps of the EC SSbD framework regarding safety assessment, environmental sustainability assessment and socio-economic assessment. In addition to guidance, case studies and other practical applications can provide useful information on the application of the SSbD Framework and are of utmost importance to benefit from the experience already gained. It is expected that as experience with the use of the framework increases, more elaborate guidance and templates will become available.

SSbD in PARC

PARC aims to support the operationalisation of the EC's SSbD framework through four interlinked sets of activities:

Translate the EC SSbD framework towards operationalisation
Toolbox development
Use cases and indicators
Knowledge sharing and education

Detailed information on the different activities can be found in the dedicated area on SSbD on the PARC website.

EU funded projects on S(S)bD

The European Commission funds research on SSbD chemicals and materials as part of the European Union’s research and innovation programmes. This commitment includes funding research into the methods and tools needed to apply SSbD, promoting SSbD networks, but also providing concrete case studies and foci on specific sectors.

Projects funded so far include:

EU Horizon 2020:

EU Horizon Europe: