Existing material selection methods seem to offer limited support for addressing substance safety in practice, as the focus remains on intrinsic material properties and less on exposure risk. This hinders Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) efforts that can prevent use and accumulation of substances of concern (SoCs) across product lifecycles in a circular economy. This study reviews 29 sustainable material selection methods to evaluate how they do support substance safety. Results show that substance safety is generally embedded within the broader sustainability realm without explicit risk or lifecycle-based assessment. Of the four steps that can be distinguished in material selection, most methods support the steps ‘Establishing a set of candidates’ and ‘Comparing candidates’ but the steps ‘Formulating selection criteria’ and ‘Choosing suitable candidates’ are often unsupported, leaving critical substance safety trade-offs unaddressed. The importance of mindsets such as systemic thinking and iterative reflection is recognized but underrepresented. The findings highlight the need to adapt existing methods with better guidance and risk integration to advance SSbD in material selection.

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.