Chemistry:Safe and Sustainable by Design

Short description: Innovation approach

Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) has emerged as a central idea in European chemicals and materials policy, especially under the Green Deal and Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability. It reframes innovation so that safety, environmental performance, and broader sustainability are built in from the earliest design stages, rather than managed reactively. As the concept matures, debates focus on how to make SSbD operational, how it relates to existing regulation, and how to translate it into sector-specific practice.

Safe and Sustainable by Design or SSbD is an approach that integrates safety and sustainability considerations into the design and development of substances, materials, products, processes, and systems, aiming to minimize negative impacts on the environment and human health throughout their entire lifecycle. It is an iterative process that focuses on proactively creating solutions that are not only safe but also offer environmental, societal, and/or economic value. SSbD was first introduced in the EU Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability Towards a Toxic-Free Environment, as one of two approaches to better protect health and environment while at the same time encouraging innovation. SSbD is expected to contribute to several Sustainable Development Goals, such as Good Health & Well-being (SDG 3) by reducing exposure to hazardous substances, Industry, Innovation & Infrastructure (SDG 9) by fostering green technology development, Responsible Consumption & Production (SDG 12) by designing for circularity, Climate Action (SDG 13) by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and Life Below Water and Life on Land (SDG 14 and 15) by minimizing pollution.

Conceptual Foundations and Policy Context

SSbD is promoted as a precautionary, preventative design concept to reduce risks while enabling a more circular economy, and is explicitly embedded in the EU Chemicals Strategy and Green Deal ambitions for a toxicity-free, climate-neutral economy.

The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre has issued an SSbD framework with two iterative components: application of design principles and safety and sustainability assessment across the life cycle of chemicals and materials.

General Overviews and Frameworks

Several works provide broad overviews and frameworks comparable to “general introductions” to SSbD:

• State-of-the-art and value-chain perspectives. Apel et al. review policy, industrial and NGO approaches to SSbD, identify five building blocks (design, data, risk and sustainability governance, competencies, and social/corporate needs), and draw lessons from multiple value chains on implementing SSbD in practice.
• Operationalization challenges. Abbate et al. systematically map 35 challenges to implementing the JRC framework, highlighting as top priorities: integration of SSbD into innovation processes, data availability/quality, and integration of safety and sustainability dimensions.
• Ambitions vs feasibility. Van Dijk et al. critically argue that, in its current form, the EU SSbD framework risks “paralysis by analysis” because suitable methods and data are often lacking; they call for a more agile, realistic framework with simplified methods and strong stakeholder support.

SSbD, Regulation, and "Regulatory Readiness"

Two streams link SSbD closely to regulation and compliance:

• Bridging innovation and law. Schwirn et al. examine how the EC SSbD framework relates to existing EU safety and sustainability legislation, showing that information generated in SSbD assessments can support legal compliance, while regulatory data and methods can inform SSbD steps, creating mutual synergies.
• SSbD as regulatory readiness tool. Sudheshwar et al. analyze 15 EU policies against 15 SSbD components and report a 64% overlap, arguing that companies can leverage SSbD for early “regulatory readiness,” adopting a “fail early and fail cheap” philosophy and improving competitiveness while preparing for future rules.
• Normative and circular-economy framing. Reins and Wijns situate SSbD within broader sustainability, circular economy and “regulation by technology” debates, exploring how embedding design-stage requirements can lower risks in the transition to a more circular European economy.

Key Claims & Evidence

Figure 1: Central conceptual and regulatory claims around SSbD

Claim	Evidence Strength	Reasoning	Papers
SSbD strongly overlaps with existing EU regulatory requirements	Evidence strength: Strong (8/10)	Systematic mapping finds 64% overlap between SSbD components and mandates in 15 EU policies
Current SSbD framework is conceptually promising but operationally difficult	Evidence strength: Moderate (7/10)	Multiple analyses identify major implementation challenges, including data gaps and methodological complexity

Methodological and Implementation Approaches

Integrated Assessment and Tools

• LCA + Risk Assessment foundations. Subramanian et al. review early-stage “Safe by Design” methods combining Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Risk Assessment (RA), noting that simple, qualitative lifecycle thinking and hazard avoidance are more common than complex ex-ante LCA or predictive toxicology, and calling for expansion from SbD to SSbD, including climate, circularity, economic and social aspects.
• Tiered SSbD assessment. Livieri et al. present a tiered SSbD approach (qualitative Tier 1 questionnaire and quantitative Tier 2 with LCA, LCC, S-LCA) for advanced multicomponent nanomaterials, showing its application to a PFAS-free bakery coating and identifying strategies to improve safety and sustainability at design stage.
• INSIGHT integrated framework. The INSIGHT project proposes a computational platform based on Impact Outcome Pathways (IOPs), integrating mechanistic toxicology, exposure, LCA, social and economic models into a knowledge graph to support SSbD decisions across four impact dimensions.

Sector-Specific Implementations

• Pharmaceuticals. Sorani et al. adapt the SSbD framework to pharmaceuticals, aligning hazard assessment with pharmaceutical regulation, production with Good Manufacturing Practices, exposure with ADME models, and sustainability with metrics such as Process Mass Intensity, ex-ante LCA, LCC, S-LCA and a Handprint approach; they report that embedding SSbD adds less than 0.2% to R&D costs.
• Advanced nanomaterials & coatings. The SUNSHINE project’s SSbD application to PFAS-free coatings illustrates how tiered assessments can show that an innovative product is “highly likely to surpass conventional benchmark materials” in safety and sustainability.

Social Impacts and Goals

Safe and Sustainable by Design can be viewed also as a method for developing sustainable substances and materials with the aim of ensuring they do not harm people or the environment.

The societal goals of SSbD are:

• Protecting human health, the environment, and nature for current and future generations.
• Creating a circular economy in which materials are reused in a high-quality manner.
• Stimulating innovations and revenue models for a sustainable and competitive chemical sector.

SSbD Principles

The principles of a SSbD development process are:

• Developers incorporate safety and sustainability into the development process from the outset.
• Companies take responsibility for safety and sustainability, regardless of legal requirements.
• Developers explicitly consider the trade-offs between functionality, safety, and sustainability.
• Companies develop substances and materials from sustainably produced recycled or raw materials.
• The substances and materials are safe throughout their entire life cycle and biodegradable or reusable after the end of life.
• Supply chain partners collaborate to continuously improve the safety and sustainability of substances and materials.

Challenges, Trade-offs, and Future Directions

Key cross-cutting challenges include:

• Integration into innovation processes. Both Abbate et al. and Apel et al. stress that SSbD must be embedded in real innovation workflows, with clear procedures, incentives and competencies across value chains.
• Data availability and FAIR infrastructure. Data gaps and uncertainty are major obstacles; proposed responses include applying FAIR principles, optimising in silico methods early in R&D, and building infrastructure for value-chain-wide data and communication.
• Integrating safety, sustainability and circularity. Authors highlight difficulties in shifting from relative to absolute sustainability, handling regionalised impacts, and managing trade-offs between hazard reduction, carbon and water footprints, and circularity goals.
• Social sustainability and supply chains. Social aspects remain underdeveloped in methods, yet practitioners identify issues such as traceability of critical raw materials and working conditions as crucial, suggesting Sustainable Development Goals as starting points for indicators.

Trade-offs of SSbD

Potential benefits for companies that apply SSbD include:

• Companies are future-proof if they operate socially responsible and stay ahead of laws and regulations.
• Companies have a positive image and are attractive to partners, investors, employees, and consumers.
• SSbD encourages companies to innovate, giving them a competitive advantage.
• Companies discover potential safety risks early on, allowing them to adjust their innovation process.
• Companies reduce the risk of future liability for damage to people and the environment.
• Supply chain partners develop a common language and working method, which promotes collaboration.
• Possible alternatives that are early on assessed as potentially hazardous or unsustainable do not need to be further developed, thus saving costs (fail fast, fail cheap).

Potential disadvantages of applying SSbD include:

• It takes time to build the necessary knowledge, skills, and supply chain collaboration.
• Not all companies have the capacity and resources to invest in SSbD.
• To work according to SSbD and achieve lasting results, a cultural shift is necessary.
• SSbD may require adjustments to production processes and facilities.
• Responsibly developed substances and materials may be more expensive.
• Not all companies succeed in developing a more sustainable and safer alternative with the same functionality.

Comparison of traditional product development and SSbD

Safe and Sustainable by Design differs from the traditional approach to product development by considering safety and environmental impact from after the moment the product has been made to satisfy legislation to an upfront requirement. Traditionally development focuses mostly on functionality and cost, which may lead to the identification of hazards in a late stage or even only after being in use for a long time (e.g., DDT). SSbD on the other hand integrates life-cycle assessment from the start and will mostly result in safer and more circular products and fewer emissions.

Policies

The European Commission has issued a framework that addresses iterative (re-)design and assessment as more data becomes available. During design phase guiding principles should be applied that steer the design choices. During this phase goal, scope and system boundaries are defined that will frame the assessment of the chemical or material. The assessment consists of four elements: determining the potential hazard, calculating possible exposure of workers during fabrication, exposure to downstream users, consumers and environment and life-cycle assessment. This assessment can be applied to newly developed chemicals and materials. But it can also be applied to chemicals and materials already on the market to improve their safety and sustainability performance during all life cycle stages. Horizon Europe, the current EU research and innovation funding programme (2021–2027) supports SSbD through funding, particularly through projects like the Strategic Research and Innovation Plan. The European Commission commissioned a study on providing businesses with support to substitute their use of hazardous chemicals by stimulating supply chain cooperation, innovation, research and direct assistance.

Historical Milestones

Safe by Design was introduced many decades ago, initially to efficiently protect workers against physical harm.

Dutch Adoption in 2018

The government of the Netherlands was one of the first to stimulate the application of Safe by Design to replace hazardous chemicals. SSbD is an extension of Safe by design to also include sustainability as to cover the necessary innovation to realise the goals of the European Green Deal.

Guidances by CEFIC in 2024

The European Chemical Industry Council (Cefic) published in 2024 a guidance intended for research and innovation teams within chemical companies to be used in addition to the Framework of the European Commission. It describes a workflow that fits the application of SSbD. The first activity is the alignment of performance and functionality needs in the form of a needs list that includes stakeholder and corporate requirements, intended use and minimum requirements. Next is the identification of the scope of the assessment dimensions including relevant hazards, exposures linked to the intended use, and relevant sustainability dimensions. This is followed by selection of the design principles for each assessment dimension. Then a comparative assessment is performed, creating assessment results by using assessment toolboxes relevant to the selected dimensions and by checking for stakeholder and corporate requirements along the value chain. Finally, trade-offs are evaluated based on a guidance and the optimal solution is selected.

Conclusion

SSbD has rapidly evolved from a policy slogan to a structured framework that seeks to embed safety, environmental performance, circularity and socio-economic considerations into chemical and material design. Foundational work clarifies its conceptual roots and regulatory role, while emerging frameworks, tiered assessments and sectoral roadmaps demonstrate how SSbD can guide concrete innovation decisions. At the same time, substantial challenges persist around data, methods, integration into industrial practice, and managing complex trade-offs. Future progress depends on simplifying and operationalising SSbD, building FAIR data and modeling infrastructures, and extending assessments to social dimensions, so that SSbD can function as a practical compass for truly safe and sustainable innovation.

See also

• Sustainable Design
• Safety Research
• Service Design