From understanding impact to designing sustainable solutions

Substitute for a sustainable future

We develop methods, data, and tools for assessing and reducing impacts of chemical, material, product and technology life cycles on humans and ecosystems. Partner with us to improve sustainability performance in technology design and decision-making.

Translating scientific expertise into operational tools

Assessing environmental sustainability using science, tools and training

Expertise

Our expertise spans chemical substitution, life cycle assessment, environmental footprinting, risk screening and Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) practices.

USEtox®

USEtox® is the UNEP-endorsed scientific model for assessing human toxicity and ecotoxicity impacts of chemicals. Trusted by scientists, companies, and regulators.

Tools & Data

Discover our scientific tools and data, from plant uptake models to chemical substitution databases. Enhance your sustainability decisions with robust science.

RobustNature Adjunct Professor, Department for Evolutionary Ecology and Environmental Toxicology, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany
CEO, substitute ApS

Peter Fantke, PhD

Peter is a leading expert in impact assessment, developing data, methods and tools for assessing emissions, fate, exposure and toxicity effects of chemicals, materials and products along their life cycle. His research is applied in life cycle assessment and chemical footprinting, chemical substitution and alternatives assessment, Safe and Sustainable-by-Design, external cost analysis, and risk screening and prioritization.

He is leading global consensus-building efforts under the UNEP Life Cycle Initiative, and provides methods and training for various stakeholders, including OECD, the European Commission, national authorities from the U.S. to Thailand, companies and NGOs, and academics.

Seeking synergies to advance science and application in sustainability assessment? Please contact me!

Applying our tools in practice

Focus areas where our tools can be applied in practice

Chemical substitution is an approach for replacing or reducing hazardous substances in materials, products or industrial processes by less or non-hazardous substances or by technological or organisational measures, based on the technical function of a given substance rather than its chemical structure. Chemical hazard and risk are the main focus, with the aim to move away from using similar drop-in substitutes that can lead to regrettable substitution with alternatives that have similar hazard profiles.

Alternatives assessment (AA) or chemical alternatives assessment (CAA) focuses on identifying and evaluating a range of functionally equivalent, safer alternatives to hazardous substances in a specific product or process application by comparing hazard and exposure characteristics, life cycle considerations, economic viability and technical feasibility.

Safe and sustainable-by-design (SSbD) is an emerging tool to foster innovation in the design and Research & Development (R&D) cycles of chemicals, materials and products based on safety and sustainability aspects. It follows a stepwise approach comprising the assessment of intrinsic hazard, risk related to production and processing, risk related to final (consumer) application, and sustainability-related life cycle impacts, and supports European Green Deal ambitions for a non-toxic environment.

SSbD can be applied to both evaluating chemicals, materials and products currently on the market as well as new designs. With that, SSbD combines elements of chemical substitution, hazard & risk assessment, and life cycle assessment, with an ambition to also benchmark environmental sustainability performance against biophysical benchmarks, such as ecological carrying capacities for environmental pollution.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) or Environmental footprint assessment is a standardized and robust decision-support tool to evaluate the environmental sustainability performance of products and technologies, in support of reaching the UN goals for a sustainable development. LCA applies a system perspective, considers all life cycle stages from resource extraction to end-of-life handling, and includes all relevant impact categories from climate change to toxicity and land use that contribute to certain areas of protection, including human health, ecosystem quality and natural resources.

Chemical footprints couple the LCA approach with elements from human & ecological risk assessment to indicate the life cycle toxicity and ecotoxicity pressure as specific area of concern associated with a material, product, technology, sector or region. Chemical footprints often use geospatial tools and mixture assessments to account for local and regional ecological contexts.

Absolute environmental sustainability assessment (AESA) is a quantitative decision-support tool to evaluate the environmental sustainability of products and technologies. Instead of comparing different systems against each other (market-internal benchmarks), every system is compared to an external set of environmental carrying capacities or limits (market-external benchmarks). For example, the life cycle impacts of a system on climate is compared to a share of the carrying capacity derived from the Paris Agreement climate goal.

Planetary Boundaries denote a set of interdependent, critical processes that together regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth system. These boundaries constitute safe limits for human pressure on our planet, while transgressing them increases the risk of large-scale abrupt or irreversible environmental changes, reducing the ability of the environment to self-regulate. Not all planetary boundaries are currently quantifiable, such as the boundary for novel entities that includes essentially chemical and plastic pollution.

High-throughput screening (HTS) of exposure or risk is an approach that makes use of different computational (in silico) techniques or in vitro bio-assays to assess human & ecological exposure and risk of thousands of chemical substances in different product or process applications. Often, machine learning and data integration methods are used to estimate physicochemical substance data that are otherwise not available. Exposure & risk results can be ranked to identify substances of highest concern.

Exposure & risk prioritization evaluate the performance of a wide range of chemical substances against specific hazard aspects, such as carcinogenicity, environmental persistence and mobility, or endocrine effects, to identify those substances that should be prioritized for further action, including the adoption of risk reduction or mitigation measures like substitution (replacement of hazardous substances by less or non-hazardous alternatives) or phase-out (banning substances from the market).

External costs, damage costs or externalities are costs associated with human and environmental health impacts that are not included in the market price (external to the market) of products or services that cause these impacts, and that are hence not borne by those that provide these products or services. Such costs arise, for example, when manufacturing processes create environmental pollution without manufacturers paying for cleaning up the polluted areas. External costs combine impact assessment with monetization to express impacts in economic terms.

Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) compares costs and benefits of alternative activities, policies or investments, both expressed in monetary units, to maximize net benefits as difference between total benefits and total costs. In contrast, cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) compares costs of alternatives per unit of a common outcome that is measured in non-monetary units, such as costs per life saved or costs per hectare of natural land protected. CBA is often applied when alternatives have multiple outcome that are aggregated in a common, monetary unit, while CEA is often applied when alternatives have a single or similar, measurable outcome.

Our latest projects

Driving innovation for sustainable environmental solutions

  • Project

    Safe Chem! — Improving ecotoxicity assessments of pharma medicine supporting Sanofi to combat global biodiversity loss from just getting better to becoming good enough: Pharma medicines that are absolutely sustainable

    Term: 12/2024 – 03/2028

  • Project

    EDCs in Products — Development of a robust method for estimating the relative magnitude of exposures and related human effects of various endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) and associated products and applications

    Term: 08/2024 – 08/2025

  • Project

    SAGROPIA — Sustainable agriculture through novel pesticides using an integrated approach

    Term: 01/2024 – 12/2028

Our latest publications

Advancing sustainability through cutting-edge research

  • Publication

    Uptake and translocation of pesticides in pepper and tomato plants

  • Publication

    Initial pesticide residue concentrations in nectar and pollen after spray application on flowering plants for assessing impacts on pollination

  • Publication

    Reflection on the landscape of education in the area of exposure modelling

Our latest tools & data resources – coming soon

Empowering decisions with data-driven solutions

We are working on bringing you cutting-edge tools and resources to support your sustainability and other assessments and decisions. Stay tuned for updates that will come soon, from models to track chemicals in the environment to bioaccumulation datasets!