On 16 June 2025, Andreas Falk from BNN had the great pleasure of leading a workshop on Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design (SSbD) for high school students at HTBLA Kaindorf in Austria.

After setting the stage about the three pillars of sustainability, the three dimensions of SSbD, its indicators and 5 steps, as a real-life SSbD implementation example Andreas introduced the case studies of the PLANETS project, which is developing safer and more sustainable alternatives for chemicals with surfactant, flame retardant or plasticising functionalities. All three of these chemical classes have a large chemical-market share, highlighting the importance of research and EU-funded projects for improving chemicals that affect our daily lives.

Many teenagers in the audience will be the engineers and scientists of tomorrow, future professionals who will play a big role for reaching the EU’s aim to become climate-neutral by 2050. With this in mind, the engagement of workshop’s participants in performing a practical exercise of Tier 1 SSbD assessment of an everyday consumer product assured us that, if we invest in educating our young people, we can shape the health of people and planet in the future!