Evaluation of a comparative safety assessment approach for products in the SSbD context

Dissemination

SETAC 2025, Europe 35th Annual Meeting, Poster: SETAC Europe 2025 - ECETOC Poster Safety Assessment Taskforce

Why

Stakeholders across various sectors, including industry and regulatory bodies, consistently seek better and more sustainable alternatives throughout a product life cycle. Measuring the actual improvement in safety and sustainability performance requires quantitative metrics aggregated into a comprehensive evaluation. While there are approaches and tools available for safety and sustainability assessment, their application and relevance for mixtures are not thoroughly evaluated.

A large portion of incremental innovations stem from the creation of a new mixture of an already established products by the modification of one or two chemicals in the mixture. Hence, a comparative safety assessment approach for mixtures is needed to evaluate the impact of  these changes on safety and sustainability. This approach aligns with the the European Commission Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability (CSS) (EC, 2020), and the Zero Pollution Action Plan (EC, 2021), pointed out the need for safer and more sustainable chemicals, materials, processes and products according to the safe-and-sustainable-by-design (SSbD) framework published by the JRC (2022).  Therefore, the key question is: what are the suitable safety metrics for evaluating safety and sustainability trade-offs in mixtures?

To date, comparative safety assessments of mixtures remain unexplored. ECETOC’s unique expertise in chemical safety assessment will be leveraged to develop and evaluate such an approach, providing crucial input for multidimensional sustainability evaluations of mixtures.