Sustainability Through Advanced Materials: Lasse Steffens (BOKU) on Thoughtful Assessment and Design

Could you please tell us a bit about yourself?

Lasse Steffens (BOKU)

Before joining the SUNRISE project as a PhD student, I studied sustainability economics at the University of Oldenburg (Germany) and worked as a research assistant at a think tank dedicated to facilitating and supporting green transitions within the European Union. My academic and professional journey centered around socio-ecological transformation sciences, industrial policy, Gramscian thought, and exploring the dilemmas associated with sustainability.

My studies emphasized the importance of critically pausing and reflecting upon concepts and ideas before applying them practically, while my experience at the think tank provided insights into the complexities of societal and political decision-making, highlighting inevitable trade-offs, debates, and alternative pathways toward long-term sustainability goals.

Throughout both my academic and professional experiences, I consistently sought not to merely adopt concepts superficially but rather to critically engage with them, examining and reflecting upon their underlying ideologies and logics.

Could you describe your role in the SUNRISE project?

Within the SUNRISE project, my primary responsibilities lie within WP3 and WP6, which focus on sustainability assessment and stakeholder engagement related to Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD). Currently, my main contribution involves developing a qualitative indicator set specifically designed to assess the sustainability of advanced materials. Concretely, my colleagues and I explore critical questions such as: How can we determine whether an advanced material is sustainable, and what does “sustainability” genuinely mean in this context?

While the first question directly informs my daily tasks within SUNRISE, the second regularly encourages me to pause and reconsider whether we are asking the appropriate questions to obtain meaningful answers. Thus, alongside generating concrete outputs for the broader project, I try to encourage our partners to critically reflect on our working definitions and concepts, especially the implications stemming from how we define sustainability.

When identifying sustainability hotspots in a product or process, what are some of the most common challenges you face in balancing environmental, social, and economic factors — and how do you prioritise what matters most?

The biggest challenge arises from the fact that sustainability is interpreted differently by various stakeholders, resulting in diverse understandings of what it means, entails, and excludes. Depending on the chosen reference, the three dimensions of sustainability—ecological, social, and economic—can either be viewed as parallel, each dimension having equal importance, or hierarchical. Personally, I find the hierarchical approach more convincing, where an intact natural environment (ecological sustainability) provides the fundamental basis for societal functioning (social sustainability) and, consequently, the development of provisioning systems (economic sustainability) necessary for producing goods and services.

Applying this to the SUNRISE project, a critical issue emerges: only advanced materials with a positive business case are produced, meaning the products must be economically profitable. Consequently, one might argue that economic sustainability inherently forms the foundational criterion before social and ecological sustainability can be adequately considered. Given sustainability's previously noted vague and ambiguous nature, balancing these different dimensions ultimately becomes a political decision, inherently normative and value-driven. This ambiguity makes scientifically approaching sustainability through a questionnaire particularly challenging.

To address this, my colleagues and I decided to base our questionnaire on established sustainability indicator lists and frameworks, such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and previous scientific literature. By relying on these existing indicator sets through a comprehensive literature review, we effectively avoided the need to personally weigh or prioritize the various sustainability dimensions, thereby minimizing bias.

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