Safer by design and nanotechnology

Safer by design (SBD) is a design theory that focuses on optimizing the benefit/risk ratio of a product or service over its entire life cycle, looking at both environmental, health and socio-economic aspects. At the design stage, this means taking a total life-cycle perspective on the product or service, and favoring a design that maximizes benefits and minimizes environmental and socio-economic risks, in order to obtain the best ratio over the entire life-cycle. So, for example, a design that would have high socio-economic and environmental benefits for the manufacturing and use phases, but would be associated with very high risks for the recycling and/or end-of-life phase, would be discarded in favor of another design solution that would have a better overall life-cycle balance, even with lower benefits for the manufacturing and use phases (for more details, see the article "Safer by design: a new way for management? [SF 2 250] ).

Within this general context, what are the challenges of safer by design for nanotechnologies, which concern the basic building blocks of new product design? Nanotechnologies enable the modification of matter at the scale of atoms and molecules to obtain new properties, and introduce changes in relationships to the environment and health over the entire life cycle. What's more, in terms of risk assessment, they introduce new issues for which there is no track record going back more than thirty years.

The rest of the article is structured as follows. The first section clarifies the technico-practical means by which a safer by design approach to nanotechnology can be envisaged; the second section examines how the key elements of governance of the various stakeholders are articulated around the safer by design approach; the third section analyzes the functioning of the methods used for this approach; finally, the conclusion takes up all the points addressed in the three sections to provide elements for prospective reflection.