Avoiding tomorrow's chemical mistakes today

Abstract

The Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) framework is gaining momentum within the European Union, with scholars, industry, and policymakers actively testing its application. This Perspective highlights the central challenges that remain, particularly in relation to methods and data. The current methodological pillars of SSbD, Hazard Assessment (HA), Risk Assessment (RA), and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) provide a solid basis for evaluating chemical safety and sustainability, as well as identifying potential trade-offs. Yet their integration with design, innovation, and broader ethical and social considerations remains underdeveloped. Beyond these methodological gaps, the greatest obstacle to SSbD is the availability and quality of data. Despite substantial progress in advancing safety and sustainability assessments, improvements in data generation, accessibility, and reliability have lagged far behind. Since both safety and sustainability evaluations depend critically on data, this imbalance undermines the framework's effectiveness. We propose a three-step data strategy focused on safety data as a starting point. Advancing SSbD in a meaningful way requires a robust, regulatory-based approach to improve data availability and quality for both safety assessments and LCA. Without such a strategy, further methodological innovation risks becoming an empty exercise that obscures rather than advances real progress.