What is Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD)?
And is it catching on in industry?
If you’ve never heard of SSbD (Safe and Sustainable by Design), you’re not alone. But if you’re in or adjacent to the chemical industry, you may want to get caught up sooner rather than later. The concept is catching on in the EU as a way to proactively improve chemical products and processes, and there are signs that it may eventually become mandatory.
SSbD is a new approach to designing, manufacturing, and using chemicals. It was introduced in October 2020 as part of the EU Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability, which attempts to fulfill the zero pollution ambition of the European Green Deal.
The formal definition of SSbD is quite long, but can be abbreviated as a pre-market approach to chemicals that focuses on providing a function while avoiding harm. Can we design chemicals and materials that do everything we need, without harming humans or the environment?
Now, Europe already has quite a few regulations around chemical safety, and product sustainability. What’s new in SSbD is the combination of safety and sustainability in one approach, and the focus on designing out risk rather than managing it. The SSbD framework proposes five assessment stages to evaluate safety and sustainability, beginning with a simple hazard assessment and ending with analysis of socioeconomic sustainability (a concept which is still being debated by academics).
The steps get more complicated as you progress through the SSbD assessment. Safety is well understood—well, if you disregard data gaps, lack of understanding of endocrine disruption, the mysterious behaviour of mixed substances... Maybe better to say, safety is a more developed concept than sustainability. “Toxicity” is better understood than “carbon footprint”, and “cancer” is a clearer threat than “biodiversity loss”. We know how to measure safety, for the most part.
Measuring sustainability is still an unsolved problem. We’ve just (sort of) gotten the hang of carbon footprint, and even gathering real-world data for that can be hugely challenging. When you broaden your perspective and start looking at more nebulous concepts like biodiversity, you wander into unknown territory. You can complicate things further by trying to measure absolute sustainability, rather than just relative—that is, can we continue to manufacture this chemical while staying within planetary boundaries?
So the SSbD concept is ambitious, and goes far beyond existing chemical regulations. So far, it’s just a framework, which was released by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in July 2022. Since then, they’ve been engaging with industry and encouraging case studies in a first testing period to get feedback about what works and doesn’t work. A second testing period is planned for 2024, with possible revisions to the framework to be proposed from 2025.
It’s not clear yet how the framework will be used once it’s complete, but industry (at least, European industry) seems to be engaging with the concept. At December’s annual SSbD Stakeholder Workshop in Brussels, there were over 80 attendees in person, and at least 310 online. Cefic (The European Chemical Industry Council) is inviting discussion of the subject, calling it “a process to accelerate widespread market uptake of new and alternative chemical products and technologies that…advance the transition towards a circular economy and climate-neutral society.” Seven major value chains are working with IRISS (the International SSbD Network) to help develop the framework:
packaging
textiles
automotive
energy materials
electronics
construction
fragrances
The widespread interest suggests there’s an appetite in industry for going beyond legislation, and developing products that are proactively good for humans and the planet. We’ve certainly seen that in the US, where industry has been taking steps to protect consumers by going beyond what’s required by the chemical legislation. It may be that in five years’ time, companies that aren’t considering SSbD in their practices will find themselves lagging behind their competition.
There are certainly practical obstacles to implementation of the SSbD framework, like the high cost of a full SSbD assessment and the lack of methodology for socioeconomic sustainability analysis. The difficulty of obtaining good data on safety for new chemicals, or sustainability of basically anything, is a major challenge. But obstacles are no reason to stop trying, especially when the outcome of a SSbD economy would be so positive for humans and our planet.
If you’d like to start dabbling in SSbD, there are eight design principles you can lean on, which have some overlap with the principles of green chemistry:
A more detailed list of actions can be found in Table 1 of the SSbD framework document, but our summary above gives you an idea of what to start thinking about as you’re designing chemicals or materials. Are you minimising use of hazardous substances, while maximising efficiency and circularity within the life cycle of the product? Chances are there’s something you could change to move in an SSbD direction quite quickly, and without the expense of a full assessment!