Redesigning Chemical Innovation
2 TU Delft Essays on Safe and Sustainable by Design
How can we make room for innovation in the chemical sector while making sure that new chemicals and chemical processes are safe and sustainable? The ‘Safe and Sustainable by Design’ (SSbD) approach is promising as a solution to this dilemma, but there are still many questions on how to best understand it and put it into practice. The Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management (I&W) and Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) have just published a collection of eleven essays by experts. Two of those essays were written by TU Delft researchers.
SSbD: What does it mean for designers and engineers?
The two essays by researchers from Delt University of Technology each address what the Safe and Sustainable by Design approach implies for how designers and engineers should go about their work:
- Safe, sustainable and circular products: design is key is an essay by Ruud Balkenende, Conny Bakker and Julieta Bolaños Arriola (Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering). This essay presents a holistic design method that enables product designers and engineers to develop products that fit in a sustainable and circular economy and that are safe both in the short and long term. According to the authors, such a design method is urgently needed to prevent that hazardous substances present in products accumulate over time as a result of reuse and recycling in the circular economy.
- Building a new generation of SSbD agents is an essay by Britte Bouchaut (Faculty of Technology, Policy & Management). This essay describes the competencies that chemical engineers need to ‘do chemistry differently’: they need to be able to question their own assumptions, collaborate with other disciplines and integrate safety and environmental performance in the design of chemicals and chemical products.
The SSbD approach at TU Delft more broadly
Safe by Design (SbD) is one of the key research themes of the TU Delft Safety & Security Institute. It is an approach that can be integrated into all research fields. It frontloads safety as a core value in any innovation or design process. SbD aims to mitigate risks as much as possible during the design process rather than during manufacturing or customer use. SbD also entails considering societal acceptance and ethical acceptability from the very start.
As such, SbD covers not only technological aspects but also, ethical, policy and institutional impacts. What SbD precisely entails in terms of risk assessment, risk management, chain coordination and so on, will vary from one field to the other. While the current literature specifically discusses Safe by Design (SbD), the Delft Safety & Security Institute aims to broaden the notion to Safe and Secure by Design.