On 29 June 2023, the Spanish Technology Platforms for Innovation in Sustainable Chemistry, SusChem-Spain, and for Advanced Materials and Nanomaterials (MATERPLAT), organised this interesting event on Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design Challenges in Advanced Materials, with the aim to promote technology transfer and cooperation between companies and public and private research centres under the prism of sustainability and design.
On 14 October 14 2020, the European Commission published the Chemical Strategy for Sustainability (CSS), one of the key pillars of the European Green Pact, which aims to enable the green transition of the chemical sector and its value chains by fostering innovation for the manufacture of new advanced products and materials that are “intrinsically safe and more sustainable from production to end-of-life”, thus introducing the concept of “Safe and Sustainable by Design” (SSbD).
Reaching 2030 by meeting the Sustainable Development Goals and 2050 by being the first climate-neutral and pollution-free continent, and thus responding to the ambitious objectives of the European Green Pact, means facing unprecedented challenges that require a commitment to collaboration and R&D&I, something that we support from the Technology and Innovation Platforms.
The first part of the conference focused on the political framework of the SSbD initiative and, in the second part, as a round table, representatives of industry and national technology centres, related to priority value chains for our country such as energy storage, automotive, packaging and textiles, presented the challenges by this new framework for the development of new products and processes in each of their industries.
Laura Torres, from ADSC, attended the event to learn more about SSbD. As former members of SUSCHEM Spain, ADSC tries to follow, when possible, their activities.
Some conclusions can be raised from the event, that was visited by around 20 persons from academia and industry mainly:
- The SSbD concept is being promoted by the EU, however there is still a lot to be defined. There are different projects and movements aimed at facilitating its definition, from the IRISS project, the CDTI, the AMI 2030, SSIA, to the toolbox proposed by the PARC project. The CDTI points out that although so far European projects related to SSbD were very few and from cluster 4, new calls will be proposed in clusters 5 and 6.
- Several events related to SSbD are planned for after the summer: SME SSbD training on SSbd tools and Case Studies (22 Sept.2023, online â organised by the IRISS project), Safe and Sustainability by Design Boot Camp (25-27 October 2023, Ispra, Italy â organised by JRC) on October 4 another webinar to be announced on the IRISS website, and another webinar at the end of the year.
- During the event, several real-life cases (e.g., are textile, railway, surface cleaning products, nanomaterials) were presented by AITEX, CIDETEC, SPB, and TEKNALIA, showing how their experience in the implementation of SSbD was. From their talks, it can be concluded that the implementation of SSbD is a rather long and complicated process for now, and each particular case, with its knowledge and existing regulations, is defining its own SSbD for its particular case/sector.
Conclusions drawn by the participating case studies:
- SSbD is a concept that is still very much in the air, the idea needs to be grounded.
- Ideally, SSbD should be something simple to apply for industries, SMEs and the different members of the value chains (its implementation will affect many). It should be feasible and also economically feasible, not causing high costs or subsidies stipulated for implementation. There are different projects and movements oriented to its definition, from the IRISS project to the toolbox proposed by the PARC project.
- It is good that companies are motivated to comply with the SSbD, the digital passport is mentioned.
- The need for user education is proposed.
- Changes in regulations are frequent and do not help.
