In a circular economy, the use of hazardous substances forces industrial designers to face ethical dilemmas that are just as complex as those in a linear economy. A system in which resources are continuously reused rather than discarded cannot afford the reintroduction of chemicals and materials that are harmful to the environment and human health. However, eliminating or substituting a substance that causes concern is not always possible due to the design requirements or a conflict of values. This classification focuses on the types of ethical dilemmas designers are met with when trying to make their designs as safe and sustainable as possible, but are unable to maximize all of the moral values involved. In order to establish some parameters, the paper generalizes these issues and categorizes them into ethical dilemmas that appear in the production stage, those that appear in the use stage, those that appear at the end-of-use stage, and those that appear between different stages of the product’s life. By categorizing the dilemmas into stages of the product’s life that they appear in, a tool is created that helps not only designers but also toxicologists, policymakers, and other stakeholders sensitize themselves to ethical issues.

Safe- and- Sustainable- by- Design (SSbD) aspires to be a transformative concept, one that would create a new social contract between science, technology, and society and align sustainable (material) innovation with societal needs (Brennan & Valsami- Jones, 2021). By incorporating regenerative principles, SSbD will deliver a “net positive impact across all stakeholder levels (nature, societies, customers, suppliers and partners, shareholders and investors, and employees)” (Soeteman- Hernandez et al., 2024, p.364). Currently, the social aspect still lags behind safety and environmental aspects in predominant SSbD approaches (Apel et al., 2024). For instance, social assessment remains at a low level of implementation and methodological maturity in various SSbD frameworks. Moreover, these frameworks tend to focus on the measurement of predefined categories of social / societal impacts (e.g. through tools such as S- LCA), but they tend to overlook, for instance, how to accommodate issues outside those predefined lists, or how to deal with
tradeoff s (Apel et al., 2024). Typically, they also focus on the chemical level and molecular substitution, thus missing out on perspectives at the product, process, and system level. In this poster, we describe complementary, sometimes critical, perspectives from social science, ethics, and (product) design that can help to advance SSbD.