Hi everyone,
Starting December 2024, I am co-chair of the EU NanoSafety Cluster (NSC) Working Group ‘Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD), Innovation & Regulation’!
Thank you to the NSC Steering Group for offering to integrate me in this new role. Using my experiences in BASF’s corporate research, in internal and external projects, I intend to use this role to build bridges between research and implementation. For two decades I lived the often-cited StageGate process, and saw projects initiated and stopped for all sorts of reasons – including safety and sustainability. Here, effective and defendable SSbD screenings create a clear incentive for companies if their customers see a value in the improved balance of all SSbD dimensions.
Working in NSC projects, but also with BASF corporate sustainability and operating divisions, I sense that the implementation of more stringent SSbD practices differs a lot between actors of the same value chain and between global regions. On the other hand, the market pull for SSbD practices differs between sectors and applications. Bridges are required both to the industrial practices of sustainability segmentation and to the JRC Guidance and soon-to-be-revised Framework. The projects of the NSC contribute cases, methods and tools that are instrumental in this endeavour – and most importantly, the NSC creates a community and platform. New challenges are ahead, such as the expansion of the scope to new classes of Advanced Materials. I am looking forward to addressing those topics within and beyond our NSC community.
Wendel Wohlleben