The SSbD4CheM project continues to build internal capacity across its consortium to ensure a shared level of understanding across disciplines.
A dedicated training programme on human and environmental exposure assessments was delivered as a series of online sessions between October 2025 and April 2026 (25.10.2025, 01.12.2025, 23.02.2026, and 28.04.2026). The training focused on equipping consortium members with foundational and applied knowledge essential for assessing chemical safety within the Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design (SSbD) framework.
The trainings were provided by experts from VITO (Wouter Gebbink and Yentl Pareja Rodriguez) and Hochschule Fresenius (Lars Eschlbeck and Stephan Wagener).
The sessions introduced participants to the basics of human and environmental exposure assessments, a cornerstone of understanding chemical risks in real-world contexts. In addition to foundational concepts, the training explored sector-specific case studies, with a particular focus on automotive applications. The trainings covered the gathering of the input that is needed to perform an exposure assessment (e.g. physico-chemcial properties, environmental fate properties), developing exposure scenarios (including operational conditions for worker exposure and emission scenarios for environmental exposure), and finally comparing the exposure to (eco)toxicological threshold values to assess potential risk. These examples helped participants connect theoretical approaches with realistic industrial scenarios, demonstrating how exposure assessment supports safer chemical design and use throughout product life cycles. The exposure/risk assessment approach as shown for the automotive case study will be applied to the cosmetic and textile case studies within the project.
