The Commission initiative for Safe and Sustainable by Design sets a framework for assessing the safety and sustainability of chemicals and materials. This framework has highlighted the challenge to integrate  health, environmental, social and economic impacts in an overarching approach that can support safe and sustainable by design (SSbD) decision making for chemicals and advanced materials.  The Horizon Europe projects ANALYST, INSIGHT, INTEGRANO, and SUNRISE were financed under the call topic HORIZON-CL4-2023-RESILIENCE-01-22 to address this challenge. The four projects have adopted complementary approaches to the development and implementation of methodologies for integrated health, environmental, social and economic impact assessment at the EU and global scales. The goal is to support and facilitate SSbD decision making when having to weigh multiple safety and sustainability criteria against each other in order to account for often diverging stakeholder trade-offs. The projects all aim to foster the acceptance and effective uptake of the developed approaches within key industries. This is achieved via a diversity of case studies targeting chemicals and materials of high societal relevance from major industrial sectors. The projects engage all relevant stakeholders along the value chain (e.g., industries, consultants, regulators, policy makers and the civil society) to take into account the existence of conflicting interests and potential impacts affecting each of them differently. The goal is to foster a shared support and agreement on the developed methodologies in order to ensure their transfigurative impact.

Collaboration activities:

ANALYST, INSIGHT, INTEGRANO, and SUNRISE, the four EU-funded Horizon Europe projects addressed under the call topic “Integrated approach for impact assessment of safe and sustainable chemicals and materials” (HORIZON-CL4-2023-RESILIENCE-01-22, see EC information) had a face-to-face meeting at NanoTox 2024 (23-25 Sept. 2024, Venice) to kick-start the collaboration, identify synergies and points in common between them to increase collaboration and avoid duplication of work.

This initial meeting concluded that:

• The project’s objectives and activities seem to be rather complementary than overlapping which holds promise for significant synergies, especially in the following areas of common interest:

  • Harmonisation of descriptors and data

  • Stakeholder engagement

  • Relevance for policy and regulation

  • Training and dissemination of results

• Therefore, ‘ambassadors’ groups will be formed for each of these topics  with ambassadors from the four projects nominated. These groups will meet regularly to formulate joint objectives and work towards desired joint outcomes.