iLCA4SSbD

Info

iLCA4SSbD is a Horizon Europe project dedicated to advancing Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) practices for chemicals and materials. It will develop an AI‑powered integrated Life Cycle Assessment (iLCA) platform aligned with the revised 2025 EC‑JRC SSbD framework, enabling consistent environmental, social, economic, and safety evaluations across all stages of innovation. Through harmonised methodologies, multi‑tiered toolboxes, and co‑creation with stakeholders, iLCA4SSbD supports industries, especially SMEs, in adopting robust, cost‑effective SSbD assessments and accelerating the transition toward safer, more sustainable products.

The Need

Advancing safe and sustainable chemicals and materials requires assessment approaches that bring together environmental, social, economic, and safety dimensions in a coherent way. While solid methodologies and datasets already exist, they are often distributed across different tools, formats, and levels of maturity, making it challenging to apply them seamlessly throughout the innovation cycle. Industries, including SMEs, must navigate diverse LCA resources, varying data requirements, and methodological choices that can be difficult to align with evolving SSbD expectations.

Sustainability and safety assessments are now central to design and regulation. As a result, stakeholders need greater transparency, comparability, and efficient decision-making across value chains.

Current digital tools offer useful features, but they lack full integration into a single platform. Consequently, they fall short in supporting multi-tiered assessments, early-stage screening, and full alignment with the updated EC-JRC SSbD framework.

To strengthen industrial uptake of SSbD principles, the community needs an AI‑enabled platform that builds on current tools and datasets, enhances interoperability, and streamlines access to harmonized methodologies. Such a system should support co‑creation among industry, regulators, researchers, and civil society, enabling more informed, efficient, and scalable sustainability and safety evaluations across sectors.

The Solution

iLCA4SSbD will deliver an integrated, AI-powered digital platform for sustainability and safety assessment. Aligned with the 2025 EC-JRC SSbD framework, it unifies existing LCA datasets and harmonized methodologies into a multi-tiered environment. This streamlines early-stage and advanced assessments to support consistent decision-making across the entire innovation cycle.

The three‑tiered iLCA approach will be implemented through dedicated toolboxes that cover environmental, social, economic, circularity, and absolute sustainability dimensions. AI techniques will help fill data gaps, simplify complex analyses, and generate robust indicators that can be applied even when information is limited. Co‑creation with industry, regulators, consultants, academia, and civil society will ensure that the platform reflects real‑world needs.

The platform and toolboxes will be validated through case studies involving chemicals, materials, and products of high socio‑economic relevance. These demonstrations will generate new FAIR, ILCD‑ and PEF‑compliant datasets and provide evidence to support EU policy implementation.

State of the Art

The project launched on May 1st, 2026, and is currently in its initial phase. This section outlines the core ambitions guiding the development of iLCA4SSbD. Our primary goal is to transform how iLCA is applied in designing chemicals, materials, products, and processes. By doing so, we will embed sustainability and safety from the earliest stages of innovation. This ambition is articulated through five objectives:

• LCA approach and platform
  Develop a tiered iLCA approach aligned with the 2025 JRC SSbD framework and implement it as an open, FAIR, interoperable platform exceeding current DSSs by integrating all sustainability pillars and stakeholder trade-offs, which existing tools only partially address.

• Sustainability toolboxes
  Provide harmonised toolboxes for environmental, social and economic assessment, including circularity and absolute sustainability, supported by AI-enabled simplification; this surpasses the fragmented current landscape where early-stage, integrated multi-pillar methods are largely missing.

• Stakeholder engagement
  Build a multi-actor ecosystem that embeds industrial, regulatory and societal perspectives into iLCA systematically integrating cognitive-bias-informed engagement and co-development mechanisms.

• Case studies and datasets
  Produce at least 50 new FAIR, ILCD- and PEF-compliant datasets covering key value chains; integrating safety, circularity, socio-economic and planetary boundaries indicators enhanced with AI-driven prediction.

• Policy and regulatory support
  Deliver continuous policy briefs and standardisation inputs to support EU regulatory implementation of SSbD extending current practice by providing integrated iLCA evidence aligned with major EU initiatives and SME needs.

Coordinator: SSbD-CE

Partners: Project consortium

Duration: 01 May 2026 – 30 April 2030 (4 years)

Funding:  4 999 369,23 €

GA: 101293799