Target-driven Substitution of Hazardous Chemicals in Consumer Products

Chemicals are the building blocks for the diversity and functionality of modern consumer products and industry processes, but the tens of thousands of marketed chemicals are also causing rapidly rising pollution and health concerns on a global scale. In response, the substitution of hazardous chemicals in products and processes has become a high-priority area in European chemicals management. Unfortunately, effective methods to identify viable alternatives to hazardous chemicals are not available. State-of-the-art tools used by industry and policy makers are limited to manual qualitative assessments of hazard properties of individual chemicals, and are thus unable to consider entire product life cycles from resources extraction to waste handling, and fail to optimise multiple alternatives with respect to human and ecological health targets for chemical pollution. To address this problem, automated and chemical function-based substitution workflows are needed with novel quantitative high-throughput screening methods that are able to consider for each alternative all relevant exposure settings and chemical pressures along complete product life cycles, and to relate these pressures to science-based human and ecological health targets across geographical scales. With such science-based and operational methods at hand, the use of hazardous chemicals can be successfully substituted by fully sustainable alternatives early in the design process. This will ultimately lead to designing products with ever fewer harmful chemicals, providing benefits across human, ecological, and economic landscapes by delivering methods enabling a sustainable consumption and production. In this talk, I will discuss challenges and opportunities to move toward methods for sustainable design that accounts for full life cycles and science-based health targets.