Issue 20, 2022

The meaning of life … cycles: lessons from and for safe by design studies

Abstract

The concepts of Safe by Design (SbD) and Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) are receiving increasing attention. The definitions of both concepts include the term ‘life cycle’ in combination with the terms ‘chemical’, ‘material’ and ‘product’, but their meanings are not further elaborated and defined in scholarly publications on SbD/SSbD. Here, we address two research questions: (1) How are the terms chemical, material and product used and defined in the scholarly literature on SbD and SSbD; (2) How are life cycles defined and which are considered in the scholarly literature on SbD/SSbD? We found largely consistent, though still confusing, uses of the terms product, material and chemical and we found four types of life cycles in the reviewed papers. Using consistent definitions of the terms product, material and chemical, we reduce the four types of life cycles found to three types of distinctive life cycles: (1) the life cycle of a product; (2) the life cycle of a chemical in a specific product; (3) the life cycle of a chemical in all its product applications. We discuss the different trade-offs that each of these life cycle approaches can identify and argue that they are complementary and should preferably all be applied in SbD/SSbD studies.

Graphical abstract: The meaning of life … cycles: lessons from and for safe by design studies

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Critical Review
Submitted
25 júl. 2022
Accepted
14 sep. 2022
First published
07 okt. 2022
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

Green Chem., 2022,24, 7787-7800

The meaning of life … cycles: lessons from and for safe by design studies

J. B. Guinée, R. Heijungs, M. G. Vijver, W. J. G. M. Peijnenburg and G. Villalba Mendez, Green Chem., 2022, 24, 7787 DOI: 10.1039/D2GC02761E

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