Europe’s Green Deal and the Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability call for chemicals and materials that are safe and sustainable by design (SSbD). Today, decisions about new substances often rely on fragmented evidence: hazard studies, exposure estimates, life-cycle assessments and socio-economic analyses are performed independently from each other, with different assumptions and formats. This slows innovation, increases costs, and makes it difficult for regulators and industry to compare options transparently.
The INSIGHT project addresses this challenge by developing and testing an integrated, mechanistic framework that connects evidence from molecules to market. INSIGHT links computational and experimental information into Impact Outcome Pathways (IOPs), which are chains of cause-and-effect that start from molecular initiating events and exposure, and lead to health, environmental, social and economic outcomes. Around these pathways, INSIGHT is assembling:
- a data graph (curated, FAIR datasets with open programmatic access),
- a model graph (documented models with clear inputs/outputs and versioning),
- pipelines that combine models and data to answer concrete questions, and
- decision maps and a user interface that guides non-experts through transparent, reproducible assessments.
Four case studies anchor the development of the INSIGHT framework to real-world needs (advanced batteries/construction materials, aerospace polymers, tyre fillers and antimicrobial coatings). Social sciences inform the design of the socio-economic pathways, stakeholder perspectives and the analysis of trade-offs, ensuring the framework supports decisions that are technically sound and societally acceptable.
By the end of the project, the INSIGHT consortium expects to deliver a pilot-ready platform that reduces time-to-decision, improves reproducibility, and supports regulatory and industrial uptake of SSbD across Europe.
