As part of its commitment to promoting Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) beyond the scientific community, the SSbD4CheM project recently contributed to an outreach activity aimed at inspiring younger generations.

Milica Velimirovic (VITO) organised an interactive workshop on microplastics at a primary school in Mol, Belgium, with a group of 41 kids and 2 teachers. The activity connected scientific research with accessible learning, introducing children to a topic that is increasingly relevant for environmental and human health.

The session combined scientific explanation with hands-on experience, allowing children to explore the topic in an engaging and practical way. It included:

• A short introduction to the “world of microplastics” 
• Interactive experiments, including microscopy observations to make the invisible visible
• A fun quiz to reinforce key learnings

The workshop highlighted how research conducted within SSbD4CheM and other projects VITO is involved (InPlasTwin, REMEDIES, Upstream) contributes to understanding and addressing challenges related to chemical safety and sustainability, including emerging concerns such as microplastics.

Beyond advancing scientific knowledge, SSbD4CheM is committed to raising awareness and fostering dialogue with society. Activities like this play a key role in building early awareness and encouraging curiosity among young people. By bringing science into the classroom, the project helps empower future generations to better understand environmental challenges and contribute to developing sustainable solutions.

Following up from the 1st NSC workshop on “SSbD scenarios for advanced and incremental innovations” (23 June 2025), the NSC Working Group on Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD), Innovation & Regulation organised a virtual 2nd NSC workshop on SSbD Scenarios on 5th December 2025. Similarly as the first workshop, this second one was prepared as a collaborative effort among several EU-funded projects: DESIDERATA,  PLANETS, SSbD4CheM, and SUNRISE.

The 1st NSC scenarios workshop laid the basis by the description of a scenario by aspects of novelty, exposure, severity, (environmental) sustainability, (economic) scope and immediacy. Case studies enabled a refinement of the scenario description (Wohlleben et al. 2025). The concept of a scenario was integrated by JRC into the revised SSbD Framework, where it serves as a bridge between the SSbD scoping and a tailored safety and sustainability assessment (reproduced in lower figure). It was described as “a specific and real set of conditions (scoping analysis elements) that define the context in which the SSbD assessment is carried out.”(Garmendia Aguirre et al. 2025). 

This 2nd NSC scenarios workshop explored how to describe an SSbD scenario, the tailoring rules related, as well as how to select which tailored approach fits best a specific innovation case. Examples of real-world cases were provided by innovators from the projects DESIDERATA, PLANETS, SSbD4CheM, and SUNRISE. In breakout sessions moderated teams went through the respective cases to define the SSbD maturity, pull and push, expected commercial value, probability of success (technical and commercial) and ultimately the return on investment that additional SSbD would expect. Obtained results were compared to six proposedly archetypal SSbD scenarios. This business-focussed algorithm enables defining a tailored SSbD in a more straight-forward manner. Such an approach, based on specifications collected during scoping, could argue for more or less extensive SSbD assessment to be implemented for different innovation cases, providing arguments for innovators in their discussion with management.