18 July, 2023
On 15th June 2023 the JRC released the first application of the European Commission (EC) Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) framework in a case study, in particular on plasticisers in food contact material. This work was performed by the EC’s Joint Research Centre (Ispra). Lessons learned include the challenge due to lack of publicly available data in all steps of the assessment, and data quality and uncertainty issues, which also need to be addressed. While running the framework, the number of different experts required points to specific SSbD training activities in future. Finally, since SSbD takes into account the whole life cycle of a given material, a system needs to be developed to enable communication along the supply chain to retrieve all necessary information to perform the assessment.
