LRI Workshop looks at progress in Non-animal-based safety assessment

Don’t forget the Long-Range Research Initiative Programme (LRI) of the European Chemical Industry Council (Cefic) is holding its 17th annual workshop on 18 and 19 November 2015 in Brussels. This year, the Annual CEFIC-LRI Workshop will focus on non–animal-based safety assessment and will showcase the outcome and impact of several LRI projects completed in 2014-2015 from the fields of environmental risk assessment, bioconcentration, chemo-informatics, exposure modelling, skin sensitization and acceptance of innovation.

Registration is now open and free!
The Cefic-LRI workshop is a must-attend event for the scientific community and an excellent networking opportunity for policymakers. This year’s venue is Le Plaza Hotel Brussels.

On the evening of the first day the LRI programme will present the winner of the LRI Innovative Science Award for 2015 and also catch up with the progress of winner of the 2014 LRI Award winner Dr Alexandra Antunes of the Centro de Química Estrutural, Complexo Interdisciplinar Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal and her work on Covalent Modification of Histones by Carcinogens: a novel proteomic approach toward the assessment of chemically-induced cancers.

AMBIT tool
The second day will feature plenary sessions on the impact of LRI projects that cover subjects including an integrated modelling tool for ecological risk assessment, a mechanistic bioconcentration model for ionogenic organic compounds in fish, passive sampling formats, exposure modelling platforms and much more.

One of the presentations will feature the project to revise and update the AMBIT tool as a predictive toxicity model based on read-across and category formation. The tool can be used for both research and regulatory purposes and will be released in early 2016 and will be fully loaded and formatted with the non-confidential part of the REACH database. LRI will soon organize hands-on training to familiarize research experts with this new web-based application. Keep an eye on the LRI website for more announcements on this.

Panel discussion
And in the afternoon of Day 2, Prof Ian Kimber of the University of Manchester with moderate a dedicated panel discussion on non-animal-based safety assessment to consider the questions: “Non-animal based safety assessment: within reach or over-sold? Do we need to set back expectations?”

The panel will focus on current and future developments in non-animal toxicity testing methods and address the key issues and challenges to developing non-animal methods in toxicology. It will also examine visionary versus unrealistic regulatory expectations e.g. in view of REACH 2018.

The panel will consist of:

• Dr Karel de Raat, ECHA
• Dr Karen Niven, Shell
• Dr Alan Poole, ECETOC
• Dr Rick Becker, American Chemistry Council
• Dr Raffaella Corvi, JRC/EURL-ECVAM
• Prof Jim Bridges, Univ. Surrey
• Dr Kirsty Reid, Eurogroup for Animals

More information
For more details of the 17th Annual CEFIC-LRI workshop visit the dedicated webpage and download the final programme.

To register for the event, please click here.

You can follow the event on Twitter via the hashtag #lri2015

For more information on the workshop, please contact Dr. Bruno Hubesch, LRI Programme Manager or the LRI Secretariat.

More about LRI
The Long-range Research Initiative (LRI) programme is a major voluntary initiative of the European chemical industry to support the long-term sustainability of its sector and European society. Through the programme we hope to identify the hazards posed by chemicals and improve the methods available for assessing the associated risks.

The LRI sponsors high-quality research of a standard publishable in a reputable peer-reviewed journal, and seeks to provide sound scientific advice on which industry and regulatory bodies can draw-on to respond quickly and accurately to the public's concerns.

LRI research supports the 3R's principle. Read more here: http://cefic-lri.org/lri-research-programme/research-areas/intelligent-testing/ and http://cefic-lri.org/news/cefic-lri-in-joint-cross-sector-workshop-on-alternatives-for-skin-sensitization-testing-and-assessment/.

Evaluating Sustainability in the Process Sectors

Every year Europe invests millions of Euros to develop new technologies and modify processes and products to bring resource and energy efficiency improvements. However, in order for EU stakeholders and industry to see the true value of these new technologies and modifications, and make informed decisions surrounding their adoption, a consistent approach is needed to assess the sustainability impact across the full value chain. This is particularly challenging when it comes to assessing sustainability across sector boundaries, or in a data lean environment.

The European process industries recognise that assessment of sustainability is an essential component of their business management. As such, many sustainability indicators, tools and methodologies already exist. However, these vary widely in their sophistication, applicability, maturity and usability thereby limiting broad cross-sectoral implementation.

Consequently, three projects have recently been funded through the Horizon 2020 SPIRE Public-Private-Partnership to coordinate studies of current approaches. The projects resulted from the SPIRE-4 call 'Methodologies, tools and indicators for cross-sectorial sustainability assessment of energy and resource efficient solutions in the process industry'. The three projects are:

• STYLE - Sustainability Toolkit for easy Life-cycle Evaluation
• SAMT - Sustainability Assessment methods and tools to support decision-making in the process industries
• MEASURE - Metrics for Sustainability Assessment in European Process Industries

Collectively they have the aim of delivering:

• Recommendations for the current use of sustainability indicators, tools and methodologies for the SPIRE sectors. These can be used for future SPIRE and other H2020 funded projects to determine the overall sustainability benefits and impacts of the projects.
• Identification of gaps in the available tools
• Recommendations for future research needs and standardisation
• A harmonised roadmap summarising the recommendations across the three projects (available at the end of December 2016)

The three projects
In order to look at certain aspects of sustainability evaluation in more detail, the three projects have specific focus areas:

MEASURE focus: in-depth cross-sectorial life cycle based evaluation approaches supporting sustainable supply chain management.

MEASURE partners: Friedrich-Schiller University Jena (coordinator: Dana Kralisch), Evonik Industries, Procter & Gamble Services Company N.V., ThyssenKrupp Steel Europe, the Technische Universität Berlin as well as the Universities of Cambridge, Manchester and Ghent.

Project Website: www.spire2030.eu/measure/

SAMT focus: industrial best-practice and opportunities for cross-sector assessment of energy and resource efficiency.

SAMT partners: VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland (coordinator: Tiina Pajula), Fundacion Tecnalia Research & Innovation, Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment & Energy, CEMEX Research Group AG, Suez Environment, Neste Oil Corporation, Bayer Technology Services GmbH, BASF SE and Asociación Española de Normalización y Certficación.

Project Website: www.spire2030.eu/samt/

STYLE focus: pragmatic sustainability tools that can be used by non-specialists.

STYLE partners: Britest (coordinator: Amy Peace), Arcelor Mittal, Britest, Carmeuse, Holcim, IVL, RDC Environment, Solvay, Tata Steel, Utrecht University and Veolia.

Project Website: www.spire2030.eu/style/ 

Broad engagement, questionnaire

The projects will build on previous SusChem-inspired projects such as PROSUITE and will be engaging with the broad process sector community through stakeholder workshops, the development of industrial case studies, in-depth interviews, questionnaires, consultations and webinars. The projects are keen to get involvement from a wide range of stakeholders, including:

• Process sector industries (cement, ceramics, chemicals, engineering, non-ferrous metals, minerals, steel and water representing big and small companies)
• Sector representatives and trade associations
• Research organisations and academia
• Representatives from other Horizon 2020 projects that include sustainability evaluation
• Public sector bodies
• Finance and investment organisations 
• Non-Governmental Organisations 
• Standardisation bodies
• End users/ customers of the sectors

If you are interested in being a stakeholder in the projects, or just to be kept informed of progress, please complete this short questionnaire by 6 March 2015. The responses to the questionnaire will inform a joint project workshop to be held at the end of March.

Sustainability Assessment: Towards a Standardised Methodology?

SusChem projects and programmes aim to support the development of products and technologies that address societal needs while being environmentally sound and economically viable. They aim to enable a future in which chemical research and innovation brings new, safe, high performance products and technologies rapidly to market: enabling society to “do more with less”. The integration of all aspects of sustainability into the framework of SusChem-inspired projects at an early stage of the development of new processes and products is a key element for their success. However this requires a consistent sustainability framework for the objective assessments of projects. A FP7 project, PROspective SUstaİnability assessment of TEchnologies (PROSUİTE), looked at the issues involved.

Achieving sustainability requires a balance of economic, environmental and social goals. This triple bottom line, often referred to as ‘people, profit, planet’ (see below), is a key element for SusChem.

But how can we objectively assess sustainability? To do this requires the development of new tools that can analyse activities and their consequences upon the economy, the environment, and society. And these tools must be adequate for measuring these complex domains, as well as their interactions. Reliably performing sustainability assessments should help point us to better, more sustainable solutions to the challenges that society faces. They should be able to highlight where performance can be improved, where corrections can be made, and where wiser choices can lead to a preferred “triple bottom line” result.

The PROSUITE project was a four-year initiative funded under FP7 that started in 2009 and worked to provide such assessment tools in particular for use in assessing new technologies. SusChem board member Gernot Klotz was a member of the advisory board for the project.

Technologies, today and tomorrow
PROSUITE developed its tools through delivering a broad life cycle assessment (LCA) framework. The tools are freely accessible on the project website and are designed to support the sustainability decisions that product developers, policy makers and businesses are facing. The tools have been tested on four technology case studies:

• Biorefineries – producing energy from organic waste
• Nanotechnology - in new textiles
• Multifunctional mobile (telephone) devices - containing rare metals that should be recycled
• Carbon storage and sequestration - to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and large-scale industrial sources.

Five pillar approach
The PROSUITE tools and concepts go beyond the traditional three pillars. In order to deliver even more detailed and meaningful results for decision makers the project adopted a five-pillar framework for assessment, which is supported by a freeware Decision Support System.

When sustainability is defined only on the traditional three ‘Ps’ approach, existing assessments may be flawed by overlapping issues. For instance, human health and income could be viewed as part of the social pillar, since both factors have a large influence on the quality of life of people. However, they also could be viewed as part of the economic pillar. To enable proper assessment, PROSUITE developed an innovative framework that limits such overlaps and ensures that each pillar has a unique set of indicators. To achieve this goal, the resulting framework proposed five pillars:

• Impact on human health: The impacts on human health of a new technology include all changes in morbidity and mortality that are caused by the introduction of new technologies, through all possible pathways, including environmental, occupational and consumer. These can be quantified using the ‘DALY-concept’ (Disability Adjusted Life Years). 
• Impact on social well-being: The social impact includes all impacts on human well-being that are related to inter-human relationships. Impact on human well-being includes everything that affects the quality of life of people both on an individual and collective basis (however, excluding human health and economics). These include impacts on autonomy, safety, security and tranquillity (SST), equal opportunities and participation and influence.
• Impact on prosperity: Technology development is often pursued to increase the quantity and quality of goods and services for consumption. Final consumption can be increased through changes in factor productivity or through the production of new products and services satisfying new consumer needs. Gross domestic product (GDP) is a measure of the value of goods and services available for final consumption. 
• Impact on natural environment: The ‘natural environment’ encompasses the natural ecosystems around the world in terms of their function and structure. For this endpoint, the aim is to quantify the negative effects on the function and structure of natural ecosystems as a consequence of exposure to chemicals, biological or physical interventions. The impact on natural environment is then expressed in terms of ‘potentially disappeared fraction of species’. 
• Impact on exhaustible resources: Impact on exhaustible resources is concerned with the removal of resources from the environment (and their use) which results in a decrease in the availability of the total resource stock. This impact category comprises abiotic resources: fossil fuels and mineral ores.

Level assessment
Another important aspect of sustainability assessment is the level at which the assessment is conducted. In PROSUITE three different levels are explicitly differentiated and addressed:

• The first level corresponds to the assessment of a process chain per functional unit.
• The second level takes additional into consideration the market penetration of the technology in a given scenario (for example, expressed in the expected total number of functional units).
• The third level goes beyond the process itself and includes the effect of deploying a technology at the system level by taking into account not only the penetration of the technology but also the implications of such penetration on, for example, trade flows across sectors in the economy.

The work in PROSUITE has resulted in an increased understanding of the complex set of approaches and tools needed to assess the potential impacts of technologies at an early stage of development.

The three projects recently awarded funding under the Horizon 2020 / SPIRE call: SPIRE-4 Methodologies, tools and indicators for cross-sectorial sustainability assessment of energy and resource efficient solutions in the process industry will further address this important area of work.

More information
For more information on the PROSUITE approach visit the project website and download the PROSUITE Handbook.