Industry Chains Are Approached For Greener Chemical Design

Just before Christmas, considerable insight and illumination came from CEFIC, the European Chemical Industry Council, with regard to how the EU plans to progress its greening of the European chemical industry, with fresh insights coming forward and a new two-year project having being initiated.   This article summarizes the main points as the coatings sector participates in all of the value chains that are mentioned. In addition, the article looks at moves towards the design of digital product passports.

A Framework for Safe a And Sustainable Chemicals

The European Commission’s recommendation for setting up a European Assessment Framework for Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) chemicals has already drawn significant input from CEFIC, which has been instrumental in steering matters along a course that more accurately reflects the demands and processes that the chemical sector is required to achieve. CEFIC’s guidance has included the following suggestions for the benefit of industry:

• Firstly, it was considered that the proposed framework, as it stood in the early stages, placed insufficient emphasis on the environmental topics of sustainability, circularity and the socio-economic impacts thereof. Instead, it was considered that the original framework placed too much emphasis on safety assessment.
• Secondly, it recommended the adoption of a more nuanced system that was innovation-friendly with the idea of a scoring system and opportunities to highlight where more work would be necessary. The early proposal was considered too arbitrary in terms setting cut-off criteria or working on exclusionary principles.
• New and greater levels of data generated by swathes of different companies would lead to a call for more
company resources.

Summarising the way forward with the EC, Daniel Witthaut, CEFIC executive director innovation, said, “We share the same objectives as the European Commission, which is to develop a harmonised and comprehensive approach to ‘safe and sustainable’ chemicals and materials and avoid regrettable substitution. We want this framework to accelerate innovation in R&D labs in chemical companies across Europe and ensure attractive business cases for the transition towards safer and more sustainable chemicals. The industry will work with the Commission during the testing period to identify how the proposed Framework could be applied and improved to deliver real results on the ground.”

Besides working with the Commission, working with industry continues apace through two projects, namely PARC (European Partnership for the Assessment of Risks from Chemicals) and IRISS, which was launched with its first meeting in November.

The IRISS Project

The IRISS project is new and is a major vehicle for fulfilling the Safe and Sustainable by Design objectives.

It has been formed in response to fulfilling various strategic objectives such as those from the EU Green Deal, the EU Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The project, which CEFIC has joined, is a consortium led by the Swedish Environmental Research Institute (IVL).

As the industry moves to embrace design and production of materials and their associated processes in more eco-friendly ways, the project takes into account factors such as functionality, life cycle assessment, circularity, safety and climate neutrality as applied to the design of next-generation technologies and chemistries.

Briefly, the IRISS project has five aims:
• Development of a SSbD ecosystem that is supportive for the uptake and utilization of Safe-by-Design (SbD) and Sustainable-by-Design (SusbD) strategies by industry, particularly SMEs.
• To contribute to criteria and guiding principles for SusbD development driven by life cycle thinking in materials and product design in a way which reflects and draws on current European and global initiatives.
• Development of SSbD roadmaps that reflect a) scientific research needs, b) skills, competences and education needs, and c) knowledge and information sharing needs. The roadmaps would be developed co-operatively for the implementation of SSbD in industry and society, including prioritised steps within research, innovation, skill demands, management and governance.
• Creation of a monitoring and evaluation programme that can scan all of the latest knowledge, information gaps and in turn translates these into specific R&D questions and governance needs that feed into systematic roadmap updates.
• To establish a structure for a permanent, gender balanced, inclusive, international and sustainable network of experts.

Six value chains within the EU industry are represented in the IRISS project. These are: construction, packaging, automotive, energy, textiles and electronics.

Looking Ahead to Digital Product Passports

The European Commission has also committed to introduce digital product passports before the end of its term in 2024. The objectives of this idea are to offer consumers greater information on product transparency and traceability (including environmental impacts), as well as data on a product’s life cycle.    This is an area which is seen as having enormous potential but it is a paradigm step for industry because the concepts of circular markets and the traceability and environmental accountability of consumer goods have neither been embraced nor communicated before.

Finding a way to communicate all that is relevant in circular product design in terms of industry co-operation and is going to require a certain pragmatism and much communication.

The idea of a digital product passport comes with the need to establish a minimum data sharing level, and that must balance disclosure from industry without compromising matters that are rightly confidential to industry.

Citing the automotive sector’s 20-year use of the International Material Data System (IMDS) to record information on the many different materials employed in automotive assembly, and early use of blockchain and encryption on the part of Dow and Solvay, CEFIC foresees these digital information sharing technologies (and in the case of encryption, protecting technologies) becoming integral to the development of digital product passports.

To this end, CEFIC has proposed the following recommendations to be considered in the development of a digital product passport:
• Establish sectoral approaches for priority material streams based on potential health and/or environmental impact, and/or based on their relevance in contributing towards achieving circular economy targets. It is considered that not all participants in the chain have the same data requirements or access, so flexibility in terms of data visibility is desirable.
• Develop means of assessing technologies and for protecting confidential business data when transmitting substance information along the value chain, in order to meet the objective of the CEAP (Circular Economy Action Plan), while increasing recycling rates.
• Develop standardised requirements regarding the communication on relevant chemicals in products.
• Build on the experience from value chains and existing initiatives related to piloting new digital technologies. CEFIC considers that SCIP database (for substances of concern in complex products) should be evaluated ahead of any further data sharing obligations on other hazardous substances.

Ioana Popescu, head of Circular Economy, Environmental Coalition on Standards (ECOS), when speaking on the topic during a recent event on sustainable futures said, “Digital Product Passports [are] valuable for consumer choices. It will help to record what the products are made of, where they came from, what materials they have, et cetera. This is an element we are not capturing so well today.”