Abstract
Moving towards safe and sustainable innovations is an international policy ambition. In the on-hand manuscript, a concept combining safe by design and sustainability was implemented through the integration of human and environmental risk assessment, life cycle assessment as well as an assessment of the economic viability. The result is a nested and iterative process in form of a decision tree that integrates these three elements in order to achieve sustainable, safe and competitive materials, products or services. This approach, embedded into the stage-gate-model for safe by design, allows to reduce the uncertainty related to the assessment of risks and impacts by improving the quality of the data collected along each stage. In the second part of the manuscript, the application is shown for a case study dealing with the application of nanoparticles for Li-Ion batteries. One of the general conclusions out of this case study is that data gaps are a key aspect in view of the reliability of the results.
Highlights
Nanotechnology has become an integral part of our society with applications in many sectors of our economy such as healthcare, cos metics, energy production, electronics, or environmental remediation
Our integrative approach, embedded into the stage gate model for SbD, aims to reduce the uncertainty related to the assessment of risks and impacts by improving the quality of data collected at each stage
The approach revealed that the taken Sbd measurements, i.e. coating and increasing the size of NP, do not cause any increased risk and the Life Cycle Assess ment (LCA) results showed as similar environmental profile of the NPs under investigation
Summary
Nanotechnology has become an integral part of our society with applications in many sectors of our economy such as healthcare, cos metics, energy production, electronics, or environmental remediation. Within the Nanoreg project the issues of safety (via SbD approaches) was combined with sustainability in order “to reduce potential health and environmental risks at an early phase of the innovation process, to enable consideration of safety aspects for humans and the environment in the design process of a product/materials, and to eliminate or minimize the risk of adverse effects along all life cycle stages of a produced material”. Within this 5th and last step of the comprehensive SbD scheme (Annex A, Fig. S2) reported in Sanchez Jimenez et al (2020a) combining RA, LCA and SEA allows to ensure that a new development ends up as a safe and a sustainable product. If at stage 2 there is a high concern with a specific physicochemical property (e.g. low solubility leading to bioaccumulation and persis tence) the company may decide to perform some in vitro tests before moving to pilot production or change the specific physicochemical property to increase the solubility (as long as the NM functionality is not significantly affected) (Sanchez Jimenez et al, 2020a)
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