The Safe‑and‑Sustainable‑by‑Design (SSbD) concept introduced by the European Commission emphasizes a transition from fragmented, discipline‑specific assessments toward a holistic and integrated evaluation framework for emerging technologies, materials, and processes. Instead of treating safety, environmental performance, social implications, and economic viability as isolated checkpoints, SSbD promotes a unified methodology in which all assessment domains operate under consistent system boundaries, enabling comparability across stages and ensuring that early design choices remain aligned with downstream sustainability objectives.
Following the SSbD approach, at early innovation stages, material developers can conduct high‑level screening, using accessible inventories, qualitative tools, and rapid assessment methods to flag potential concerns and knowledge gaps. As the technology progresses toward higher technology‑readiness levels and upscaling of production, the assessment becomes progressively more detailed, incorporating refined models, higher‑resolution exposure and hazard data, life‑cycle inventories, and increasingly quantitative sustainability metrics. This tiered approach ensures that decision‑making remains robust throughout development while avoiding unnecessary burden in the earliest stages, ultimately guiding innovations toward solutions that are demonstrably safe, responsible, and sustainable by design.
The NiCKEFFECT project focuses on developing nickel‑based ferromagnetic coating materials as an alternative to platinum‑group metals (PGMs), addressing their high cost, supply‑risk, and critical‑raw‑material status in Europe. Its core technological strategy is the design of advanced Ni‑based porous coatings, produced through innovative deposition processes, increasing the surface‑to‑volume ratio, improving catalytic performance for energy applications and achieving enhanced magnetoelectric effects in electronic devices.
Across the project, Ni‑based materials are tailored and validated for three key application domains: (a) Water Electrolysis, (b)Fuel cells, and (c) Magneto‑electronic devices. At commercial scale, Fuel Cell and Water Electrolysis electrodes rely predominantly on platinum‑based nanocatalysts, typically consisting of Pt nanoparticles dispersed on high‑surface‑area carbon supports, forming a porous catalyst layer integrated into the gas‑diffusion electrode. Studies consistently show that catalytic performance and durability depend on nanoscale features such as Pt particle size, dispersion, and pore architecture.
From an LCA standpoint, difficulties arise in defining an appropriate functional unit, obtaining reliable inventory data, and quantifying impacts given the limited knowledge on nanomaterial fate and effects. Against this backdrop, as part of the NICKEFFECT Risk and Sustainability assessment activities, a set of open‑access RA and LCA tools were screened for their suitability in different steps of the SSbD framework, including openLCA for sustainability assessment, USES‑LCA for generating characterization and risk factors, NanoSafer and Stoffenmanager Nano for occupational exposure assessment, and the LICARA nanoscan as a simplified integrated tool. These tools were applied to two laboratory‑scale nanomaterial synthesis protocols, each tested in two alternative formulations to determine whether the methods can distinguish between options. The suitability of different tools was confirmed to capture the nano-specific risks of different materials, while both risk and sustainability assessment tools were able to guide between alternative nanomaterial formulations. Finally, the results highlight how strongly the definition of the functional unit influences both RA and LCA outcomes, highlighting the need for consistent, function‑oriented assessment across all SSbD steps.