What these “problem substances” also have in common is measures only ended up taken long after everyone became aware of the problems.
In order to better avoid such serious mistakes in future, the EU launched the large-scale Partnership for the Assessment of Risks from Chemicals (PARC) project. It connects authorities and research institutions from 29 countries and aims to enable a better risk assessment of chemicals.
One of PARC’s goals is to develop a toolbox of methods and models to use in an effort to identify and prevent risks at an earlier stage. The Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) is participating in the sub-task Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD).
Tools to ID Dangers
“We want to develop tools to identify the potential dangers of chemicals to humans and the environment right at the start of the development process,” said Empa researcher Bernd Nowack from the Technology and Society department, co-leader of the SSbD sub-task.
PARC is now about halfway through its seven-year term. Researchers have already developed initial versions of an SSbD toolbox and tested them on well-known chemicals.
“In collaboration with other institutions, we applied the tools to bisphenol A (BPA),” Nowack said. “A great deal is already known about the risks and effects of this chemical. This allowed us to test how well our models work.”
In practice, the SSbD approach is not quite as simple as it sounds.
Empa researchers Fiorella Pitaro and Bernd Nowack develop methods to assess safety and sustainability of new chemicals.
Source: Empa
“We can assess and quantify the risks,” Nowack said. The difficulty lies in interpreting these figures. This is because there is hardly any data available for a brand-new chemical.
To that end, Nowack’s team of researchers specializes in working with estimates, models and probabilities. The researcher said in the future, specially trained experts – known as SSbD practitioners – will end up needed for this, both in industry and in the public sector.
Working on a research project of this size presents certain challenges.
“Our part of PARC is as big as an entire ‘standard’ EU research project,” Nowack said. The work covers numerous areas and sub-tasks, so by the end of the project, many different advances and improvements should be on the table.
The researchers are now continuing to develop their toolbox.
Looking at Other Sectors
Next, they want to take a closer look at the development processes used in pharmacy and agrochemistry.
“SSbD – at least the ‘safe by design’ part – is already standard practice in the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries,” Nowack said. “If a drug is not safe for humans, it does not develop any further.”
They are now investigating how the methods used for this can also apply in other sectors of industry.
They also want to collaborate more closely with industry in the future, because SSbD does not end up limited to research and regulatory authorities, according to Nowack. “SSbD must end up taken into account as early as possible in the development process of a chemical – and these development processes mainly take place in industry,” he said.
For Nowack and his colleagues, PARC is an opportunity to further deepen their expertise in the field of SSbD. In addition to the chemicals that are the main focus of PARC, they also want to add methods for materials to the toolbox. An initial case study with the new wonder material graphene showed a complete SSbD assessment is also possible for a novel material.