Assessment of the sustainable use of chemicals on a level playing field

Misleading conclusions can result from applying tools beyond the purposes for which they were designed. A range of chemical assessment systems was compared against a set of principles germane to the sustainable use of chemicals relevant to the whole societal life cycles of finished products. These principles of sustainable use included: wider dimensions of sustainability, a foundation in science, consideration of life-cycle risk rather than simply intrinsic chemical properties, contributions to meeting human needs, open access, and peer review. A transparent basis in science is important for deriving objective, comparable, and replicable sustainability-based findings across materials and applications, and for guiding innovation. Few assessment systems currently identify how use of substances contributes to meeting human needs, a vital albeit often overlooked aspect of sustainable development, with most based largely on potential hazard without addressing wider life-cycle exposure and risk assessment. Qualitatively differing substances were illustratively assessed against the sustainability principles and life-cycle context of the Additive Sustainability Footprint (ASF), aspects of this analysis highlighting how differing material sourcing, manufacturing, and management in-use and at end-of-life can lead to widely divergent sustainability assessments. These illustrative ASF assessments also demonstrate that material use challenges, assessed on a systemic basis, are common across materials, with no defensible automatic assumption that there are inherently "good" or "bad" materials; differing stewardship across whole product life cycles substantially influences sustainability credentials for all materials. It is therefore important that the sustainability performance of all materials is assessed on an objective "level playing field," which also highlights "hot spots" for sustainable innovation from supply-chain management through manufacturing, substance selection by material compounders, maintenance inputs in product use, and beyond product end-of-life. Chemical regulation must evolve to include and embed wider sustainability principles into operational practice and become applicable and enforced across increasingly global value chains. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2023;19:1131-1146. © 2022 The Authors. Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society of Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry (SETAC).