Researchers from NORCE Norwegian Research Centre and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland represented the OXIPRO.EU project at the SSbD24 conference from November 10-15, 2024 in Monte Verità, Switzerland. This annual event, which was organized by ETH Zürich, University of Zurich, and EMPA- Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, brought together experts from relevant and diverse fields who are working around the Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design (SSbD) topic.
SSbD is a scientific-technical framework developed by the European Commission´s Joint Research Centre to support the implementation of the Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability´s set of actions for safer and more sustainable materials and chemicals.
At the SSbD24 conference, OXIPRO researchers from NORCE presented a poster on applying the SSbD framework to the innovation case on improving the smell of fish by-product for nutraceutical use (https://zenodo.org/records/14981867). This assessment provides promising insights for the transformative potential of the fish protein hydrolysate system for nutraceuticals. OXIPRO researchers from VTT gave a talk entitled “Oxidoreductase enzymes as safe and sustainable alternatives for conventional chemicals”, presenting the first results of the sunscreen case which studied the possibility of replacing traditional UV filters with new enzyme-derived polymers.
The conference was a great opportunity to network with researchers from many different disciplines working in the SSbD space. As the framework is a work-in-progress, it was especially useful to engage with the stakeholder community to learn from each other´s experiences.