Nano and advanced materials: safe and sustainable by design

A new paper, based on a September 2022 stakeholder workshop in Italy, summarizes progress on safer and sustainable by design (SSbD) approaches for nano and advanced materials and highlights recent work to meet the challenges to their practical implementation:  including progress on projects that Vireo is carrying out as a DIAGONAL Project Partner.

If developers could predict the safety and sustainability of a proposed new product at the earliest stages of its development, they could make intelligent choices of materials and processes to reduce its environmental, health and safety (EHS) impact. It’s a compelling idea, and the EU Commission has funded several projects applying the concepts SSbD to nano, bio-based, and advanced materials.

The paper identifies the most critical needs for implementing SSbD approaches, including a need for life cycle analysis factors for predicting environmental sustainability, and knowledge gaps related to exposures, including the amount of materials that are released into the environment.

The DIAGONAL project is integrating new hazard and exposure data into novel multi-scale modelling tools, such as exposure modelling, physiologically-based kinetic modelling, and structure–activity prediction networks, which help bridge these data gaps. The stakeholders at the workshop identified challenges in translating the scientific findings into a decision-making framework. They highlighted the DIAGONAL project which is helping to meet these needs, including the project’s work developing and implementing a safe-by-design toolbox and practical guidelines for assessing multicomponent nanomaterials and high aspect ratio nanoparticles.