The importance of the life cycle perspective for safety assessment in the European Commission's Safe and Sustainable...

The European Commission Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) framework represents a paradigm shift in innovation by integrating safety and sustainability considerations from the earliest stages of development, guided by a life cycle perspective. A key driver of this shift is the extension of safety beyond siloed considerations towards a comprehensive life cycle approach. However, this extension of safety to the entire life cycle remains insufficiently understood and is often underestimated or even neglected by practitioners, largely due to a lack of understanding of its practical implications. The life cycle perspective in SSbD is closely linked to another novelty that the framework brings to innovation, the sustainability dimension, which is traditionally addressed through life cycle assessment (LCA) and which inherently captures all life cycle stages of a product for the impact assessment. Likewise, adopting a life cycle perspective in safety requires moving beyond the traditional context-specific safety (substance safety, process safety or product safety). Instead, it requires a more holistic view that considers value chain complexity and safety across all chemicals, processes, products and receptors involved in the SSbD life cycle. This shift requires breaking down long-standing disciplinary silos that were originally developed to manage this value chain complexity. It calls for greater collaboration, building bridges across these disciplines and transparent information sharing across value chains. This paper highlights and explores the importance of the life cycle perspective for safety in the EC SSbD framework. It presents the Scoping Analysis as a central methodological component in the revised framework that strengthens the life cycle thinking in safety.