Innovating towards a more sustainable future - new article from IRISS published

A new article from the EU funded IRISS project has been published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Sustainability. The article presents SSbD building blocks and enablers to create an innovation landscape ensuring safer and more sustainable chemicals, materials, production processes.

SSbD is a preventive approach that promotes social responsibility and facilitates economic growth and innovation by integrating safety, sustainability, and circularity with functionality in the innovation and design phase of chemicals and materials for the entire lifecycle of the final product.

The article “The safe-and-sustainable-by-design concept: innovating towards a more sustainable future”, published in September 2024, presents four building blocks developed: regenerative corporate and societal strategic needs, risk and sustainability governance, competencies, and data management.

Four key enablers for SSbD are linking all the above-mentioned building blocks: (i) Education and knowledge-transfer about SSbD, what it is, how to apply it and ensuring that all stakeholders talk to each other and all speak the same language; (ii) applying TRUST (Transparency, Responsibility, User focus, Sustainability and Technology) principles for data generation and management, (iii) Supported by industry, policy, citizens, and all relevant stakeholders in the value chain and lifecycle, and (iv) Enabling sustainable growth (either incremental or disruptive improvements) with a forward-looking approach ‘striving for doing better today than what was done yesterday’.

The article concludes that a holistic and systems approach for SSbD is needed with processes and infrastructures to connect all value chain stakeholders and facilitate co-creation of SSbD solutions. Too often the discussions are on data and tools and not on building the necessary multi-disciplinary infrastructures and processes needed to build a system to address regenerative corporate and societal strategic needs (considering service and function), risk and sustainability governance, competencies, and FAIR data; as well as involving all the necessary stakeholders.

Read the full article here External link, opens in new window.