SAbyNA

ABSTRACT

Safe and sustainable innovation requires a good understanding of the potential health and environmental risks along the life cycle of a product. In the absence of specific and integrated regulatory guidelines for the management of risks associated to the use of nanomaterials (NMs) and nano-enabled products (NEP), numerous organizations have produced guidance documents with the aim of covering the obvious management gaps that exist in the different application domains (workers, consumers, environment). There is still a need to provide industry with easy to use and integrative guidance with clear workflows exploiting the most relevant resources for each evaluation case, so that industry can efficiently manage the potential risks associated to NMs and NEPs. 

The challenge now is to distil and integrate available resources (methods, models, frameworks and tools) to reduce their complexity, costs and delocalization. To address this challenge SAbyNA will develop an integrative user-friendly Guidance Platform with optimal workflows to support the development of safe-by-design of products (NMs and NEPs) and processes over the whole life cycle. A panel of safe-by-design strategies and risk mitigation measures will be incorporated in the Guidance workflow with hierarchies and decision trees to facilitate the identification of most suitable approaches for each case. SAbyNA will also develop specific modules of such Guidance Platform tailored to the Paints and 3D-printing industry, to showcase how usability can be increased by targeting specific industrial sectors. A continuous dialogue with different stakeholders and end-users will maximize the added value of the SAbyNA Safe-by-design Guidance Platform, which will also be demonstrated in real life industrial case studies.