The European Commission’s Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) framework requires safe and sustainable outcomes from process and product design, and any subsequent changes to these products and processes. This usually requires a costly, time-consuming life cycle analysis (LCA) which moreover requires considerable technical expertise. The methodologies described and utilised in the ETERNAL white paper provide tools that can be used from project conceptualisation onwards, particularly when specific design parameters such as cost and energy consumption details are not fully known. Aspects of the product or process alternatives that are considered in the so-called ‘FESSA-EED’ study include safety, environmental impact, technical feasibility, business model, supply chain constraints and social impacts. In this way, unnecessary and costly investments pursuing unfeasible options through the exhaustive LCA process can be avoided.
Henderson et al. (Sun,) studied this question.