Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD)

Safe‑and‑Sustainable‑by‑Design (SSbD) is about integrating chemical safety and sustainability into the earliest stages of research, development and innovation. The updated voluntary SSbD framework provides companies with a clearer and more structured process for making early design decisions that reduce risks, save resources, and strengthen competitiveness in the green transition. The framework is built around three main components: scoping, safety and sustainability.

🚀How SSbD strengthens competitiveness

A key addition in the updated framework is that SSbD is now clearly positioned as a strategic tool for competitiveness. By combining scoping, safety and sustainability into a single methodology, companies gain a decision‑support framework that enables them to develop innovations that are safer, more sustainable and market‑ready from the start. SSbD reduces the risk of costly late redesigns, supports regulatory compliance, and strengthens a company’s position in a market where transparency, circularity and high sustainability requirements are becoming increasingly important. In short, it provides a more robust and future‑proof innovation process.

🔍Scoping – defining the innovation system and starting point

The scoping stage in the revised 2025 SSbD framework is designed to clearly delineate the system boundaries, describe the innovation, and define actors and lifecycle stages before any assessments are carried out.
Scoping aims to:

• Identify which part of the chemical/material system the innovation concerns (molecule, process, product),
• Describe the goals, design principles and decision criteria,
• Map the actors along the value chain, including their roles and information needs.

The outcome is an SSbD scenario that determines the appropriate level of assessment (screening, intermediate or full) for the first iteration. This is a key improvement in the new framework and provides a more flexible and methodical starting point for the development process.

⚠️Safety – integrated and iterative risk assessment

The updated version of the framework merges previously separate steps into a holistic safety component. The safety stage now includes:

• Intrinsic properties – physicochemical characterisation forming the basis of all risk assessment.
• Exposure + hazard – an integrated analysis of hazardous properties and exposure scenarios for workers, the environment and end‑users.
• Process‑related safety – a newly strengthened element assessing safety aspects linked to production processes, technology choices, operating conditions and accident risks.

The safety component follows a tiered approach, where innovation can begin with a screening level (simple criteria and worst‑case assumptions) and be expanded with data, modelling and measurements as development progresses.

🌿Sustainability - environmental and socio-economic assessment

The sustainability component consists of two main elements:

1. Environmental sustainability (LCA)

• This assesses environmental impacts across the entire life cycle (e.g., climate impact, resource use, toxicity).
• The updated framework introduces a tiered LCA approach — screening → simplified LCA → intermediate → full LCA — which allows assessments to evolve as more data becomes available.
• It also includes support for identifying hotspots and comparing alternatives using three reference types: proxy, benchmark and representative systems.

2. Socio‑economic sustainability (significantly expanded)

• This covers social justice, working conditions, supply‑chain risks, critical raw materials, economic robustness and life‑cycle costs.
• The aim is to link design choices directly to competitiveness, resilience and business risks, helping organisations understand how sustainability performance influences long‑term market position and strategic decision‑making.