Development of safe and sustainable alternatives to substances of concern (IA)

Expected Outcome:

• Make safer and more sustainable alternatives to substances of concern available to the industries offering products with targeted performances and supporting their competitiveness,
• Speeding up the innovation cycle within a value chain important for European industry;
• Enhancing competitiveness of the industries by reducing regulatory and operational costs, while making supply chains more secure;
• Production processes, chemicals, materials and products that are inherently safer and more sustainable for a clean and autonomous economy; and
• Demonstrating how the safe and sustainable by design (SSbD) chemicals and materials framework can guide innovation and encourage innovators to minimise the use of substances of concern, reducing negative impacts on human health, climate and ecosystems.

Scope:

The focus of this topic is on alternatives for the substitution of substances of concern (SoCs) as defined in the Ecodesign for Sustainable Product regulation^[1]. The design and development of these alternatives should lead to an innovation cycle covering their (re)design, development, production processes, and integration into products in manufacturing.

The scope includes necessary developments of related processes and technologies to ensure alignment with and integration in industrial manufacturing facilitating uptake of the develop alternatives. If relevant, challenges for the adaption of existing production lines should be identified and solutions proposed.

Proposals should develop new chemical substances, innovative advanced materials or technologies to replace existing SoCs in one of the following areas: energy, mobility, construction, electronics, technical textiles as well as medical devices.

Proposals should demonstrate that the proposed alternative has a clear use case, market and potential to grow. The substitution barriers for the selected applications should be identified and effective mechanisms to maximise substitution within the targeted value chains proposed.

Proposals should demonstrate that SSbD framework^[2] will be applied throughout the innovation process, showing that safety and sustainability principles are actively integrated and influence decision-making in a transparent and traceable way, and ensure that the data generated within the proposal may be shared with the Common Data Platform for Chemicals. The new alternatives to be developed should meet the technical functions required in the specific applications while aligning their innovation process decision making with such framework.

Proposals are encouraged to cooperate with relevant projects and should contribute to and cooperate with the EU Innovation and Substitution Hub(s). Proposals should allocate the necessary resources to the proposed activities.

Proposals should include a business case and exploitation strategy, as outlined in the introduction to this Destination.

Proposals could consider involving the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC), whose contribution could add value to the operationalisation of the SSbD framework.

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[1] REGULATION (EU) 2024/1781 establishing a framework for the setting of ecodesign requirements for sustainable products, Article 2: definitions, recital 27

[2] See documents defining the SSbD framework and criteria on: https://ec.europa.eu/info/research-and-innovation/research-area/industrial-research-and-innovation/key-enabling-technologies/advanced-materials-and-chemicals_en