Agenda

Danail Hristozov has been a Visiting Scholar at DAIS thanks to the support of the Department of Excellence. Here some question about his research:
1. What are advanced materials and why are they important for the green transition?
Advanced materials (AdMa) are materials designed with novel or enhanced properties. They include nanomaterials, bio-based materials and complex composites. While they enable more sustainable products, supporting the green transition of the EU industry, their complexity makes it challenging to assess their safety and sustainability impacts. Evaluating these aspects early is crucial to avoid costly redesigns later in the innovation process.
2. How does the Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) approach change material development?
SSbD challenges the safety and sustainability of the new materials and products from the earliest design stages continuously providing feedback to innovators. This iterative process helps improve materials while reducing R&D and compliance costs, making industries more competitive in the green economy.
3. How important is a truly interdisciplinary approach in your research? 
One of the key challenges is comparing aspects that are very different and therefore hardly comparable. There are also conflicting priorities between short-term risk reduction and long-term environmental goals. Addressing these issues requires an interdisciplinary approach and tools capable of evaluating safety and sustainability simultaneously, but also leveraging expertise from social science and humanities.
4. Where can SSbD have the most immediate impact?
SSbD is particularly relevant in sectors with complex chemistries or strong regulatory pressure, such as: chemicals, cosmetics (with increasing consumer demand for "clean beauty"), food packaging (tightening rules on what can touch our food), textiles (the fashion industry is under fire for its chemical footprint and waste), electronics (materials used in batteries and circuits for green energy transition) and construction (reducing Volatile Organic Compounds in paints or generate non-toxic wood treatments).
5. What are the main challenges in translating these approaches into practice?
Key challenges include the lack of high-quality data in early development stages, such as chemical property and hazard of new materials or up-to-date life cycle inventories for novel or bio-based chemicals; confidentiality issues; and the difficulty of integrating safety and sustainability into innovation processes. Managing trade-offs (innovators often face direct conflicts, such as a safer chemical that is less effective or a sustainable material that is significantly more expensive), as well as the need for interdisciplinary skills, further complicate implementation, especially for SMEs.
6. What are the most promising research directions?
Research is shifting away from just ‘making things better’ toward ‘making things circular’. The goal is to decouple economic growth from resource consumption. In addition, the use of Artificial Intelligence in sustainability assessment is another area of new development.
7. What role will data and modelling in AdMa play in the future?
Data and modelling are shifting innovation from trial-and-error experimentation to predictive approaches. They can accelerate SSbD by: simulating the environmental impact of new materials before they are even synthesized; supporting the search for sustainable alternative materials; improving process efficiency through tools such as Digital Twins and Product Passports (tracking a product’s carbon footprint, material composition, and end-of-life options).