Workshop about Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD)

On the 25th of June, the AI-TranspWood group met for the online workshop regarding Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) framework.

The goal of the workshop was to determine the safe and sustainability requirements, key performance indicators, and potential safety and sustainability hot spots for transparent wood. To start SSbD work the life cycle of the transparent wood and its manufacturing is determined in the workshop through process visualization. The workshop began with a short introduction to SSbD.

Safe and sustainable by design (SSbD) is a voluntary framework that can be applied in the innovation or (re)design of chemicals and materials. The framework development is still progressing and the current JRC proposition is heavily focused on assessments to support the safe and sustainable designing of a material or chemical.

The framework is iterative, and divided into 5 steps, where the final fifth step is voluntary. The SSbD assessment steps can be combined with the stage-gate process: the assessment level can be simplified in the early stages. As the TRL level increases, the knowledge and data become more available, enabling intermediate and full SSbD assessments.

As the proposed method is heavily focused on assessments such as safety, human health, environmental impact, and life cycle assessments, the early-stage design principles are defined with multi-KPI targets that follow all the five dimensions of SSbD: environmental, economic, social, safety, and functionality.

Figure 1. The SSbD framework from JRC