The CheMatSustain consortium recently held its first interactive review workshop, marking a significant milestone in the co-development of the CheMatSustain Facility, an emerging decision-support platform designed to centralize and streamline data on nanomaterials for use by researchers, policymakers, and industry stakeholders. This event represented a key step in stakeholder engagement, offering a space for meaningful dialogue and hands-on collaboration aimed at ensuring the Facility reflects real-world needs. CheMatSustain is an EU-funded initiative that seeks to deepen our understanding of nanomaterials and their potential impacts on human health, safety, and the environment. A major pillar of the project is to harness innovative technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), to predict the properties of novel materials and accelerate the materials innovation process. An important first step towards this goal is the development of a new tool, the CheMatSustain Facility, where all the research findings can be aggregated and easily accessible, creating a one-stop decision-making tool in all nanomaterial matters. To ensure this platform’s practicality and adoption it has been developed by experts together with our stakeholders. Events like this workshop are essential to both inform potential users and work together to better tailor the tool to the current needs of policymakers, researchers and industry alike.
The workshop brought together 35 stakeholders from diverse sectors, including academia, industry, and policy. The session was facilitated by Carolyn Brand (Strategy consultant), Genc Alimehmeti and Mario Miozza (University of Bologna), who guided participants through a carefully structured agenda blending presentations, interactive sessions, and open discussions. The first point of interest was to identify relevant challenges and priorities in nanomaterial research and development, from policy to societal perspectives; then the plans for the platform underwent a collective validation, where feedback was given on its structure, functionalities and accessibility. Thanks to an engaging mix of different formats, the facilitators were able to capture the participants’ insights from several guided questions.
For the development of the facility, feedback from stakeholders with different backgrounds is essential, which is why tracking the workshop’s participants’ field of work was important in this event. Through an interactive survey, it became clear that the majority of participants belonged to universities or other research facilities working with nanomaterials, followed by industry workers and a very limited number of consumers.
The workshop continued in this interactive and collaborative way, a short association exercise revealed differing opinions regarding Nanomaterials, as we can see from the produced word cloud on the right. This created the right context to present the underlying issues that sparked the idea for the CheMatSustain project, namely the limited understanding of nanomaterials’ long-term safety implications and the lack of comprehensive tools for risk and impact assessment. After this overview on general nanomaterial issues, the facilitators aimed to brief the participants on the more specific challenges that emerged within the project itself, like the industry’s difficulty in aligning with regulatory guidelines or the lack of data to train AI tools. The participants were then called to judge the relative severity of the proposed challenges based on their own specialized experiences. The gathered results show a net separation between the top spots, all related to the safety and
sustainability impacts of nanomaterials, closely followed by a concern for the yet unclear regulation, and the management and skills needed to deploy nanomaterials, like the need for specialised LCA or multidisciplinary figures. The last place is reserved for the lack of a unified and clear guideline on nanomaterials classification, which proves to be a less daunting challenge.
The CheMatSustain Facility was then presented as a potential solution to some of these issues, first explaining its main objectives, to be a support in decision-making, to accelerate technology deployment and to mitigate safety and sustainability risk, all while growing awareness of these concerns among consumers and citizens. A high-level overview of the Facility’s planned structure was shared with participants. The platform will comprise several core components, including an open database with information on materials’ ecotoxicity, along with an innovative AI tool predicting the ecotoxicity of novel nanomaterials. And a newly developed footprint scorecard to easily check and compare different materials’ assessed impacts.
Stakeholders were asked to provide real-time feedback on key features of the CheMatSustain Facility. The Footprint Scorecard, still under development, was positively received, and this feedback will help shape it into a tool that will actually reflect real-world industry needs and uses. This ranking also served to validate the current direction, as all functions except ‘Providing recommendations for product life cycle management’ scored consistently high in significance, and all clustered at similar levels, meaning that these are all relevant functions to be integrated in such a tool.
The AI component also generated significant interest. This tool is also still in developement, and while its potential to accelerate R&D and reduce animal testing received moderate enthusiasm (scores of 6.5 and 7 respectively), its use in selecting less hazardous materials during early-stage product development was highlighted as the most promising application, furthermore its deployment could mean a raise consumer confidence in novel nanomaterial products. The major advantage, according to the gathered stakeholders, would be instead as a support in the selection of less toxic materials during the initial product development phase. This reinforces the role of AI not just as an efficiency tool, but as a driver of safer innovation.
Regarding the Risk Assessment component of the scorecard, stakeholder responses confirmed earlier findings: environmental and health concerns were rated significantly higher than economic or social impacts. This trend was further supported by qualitative comments from participants, as they show not only a promising mentality shift, but also a more focused use of specialised tools, Risk Assessment should in fact, be more relevant for the physical characteristics of the materials, and less on what was called ‘bureaucratic requirements’.
The final segment of the workshop addressed communication strategies, both within expert communities and toward the general public. The participants were asked to prioritize certain characteristics on policy and business reports, showing a marked desire for clear and harmonized standardization, as the top 3 spots consisted of a clear nanomaterial definition, standardized safety protocols to raise reliability and cross-industry data comparability, and improved labeling when considering the final consumer. Meanwhile, smaller scale LCAs or industry best practices showed a smaller appeal, probably related to their less universal applicabilities.
For public dissemination, the findings are explained in a much simpler way. The most effective dissemination tool, according to the participants, are conferences and workshops, followed by video content made by experts, and only after that the reliability of scientific publications comes into play. Dense specialised tools like market analysis and policy briefs are instead considered to be much less effective in informing the wider public, who would have to seek them out and be up to date with any current developments and specialised terminology just to follow along.
The results served as a starting point for a short discussion, engaging the participants and letting them share their insights. Building on the need to use policy change as an incentive to shift profitable and well-established paradigms, the discussion moved to the most novel and possibly disruptive element of the facility, the AI implementation. While provoking doubts on machine learning sustainability and its role in workflows, this tool was presented as an alternative to prolonged R&D and animal testing, leveraging a different facet of sustainability and showcasing the complexity of the topics discussed, proving the need to take stock of where stakeholders stand on these issues.
The CheMatSustain workshop proved to be a successful and insightful event, demonstrating the value of collaborative development in shaping tools like the CheMatSustain Facility. By involving a diverse group of stakeholders in open dialogue and co-creation activities, the project has taken a crucial step toward building a platform that not only meets regulatory and industrial needs, but also supports broader societal goals. As development of the CheMatSustain Facility continues, this feedback will play a key role in shaping a more sustainable, informed, and innovation-friendly future for nanomaterials.
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