Towards Addressing Co-Creation Gaps: Automating Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design Workflows with Electronic Lab Notebooks

The Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design concept integrates Safety Assessment and Life Cycle Assessment tools to create a new systematic approach addressing challenges in chemical safety, environmental impacts, and material circularity. However, fragmented data sources, complex assessments, and a lack of efficient collaborative tools hinder its effective implementation. This work outlines a structured, co-creative approach to the Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design process, leveraging automated workflows to overcome these challenges. A central component is an Electronic Lab Notebook configured to represent essential Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design resources - chemicals, materials, (manufacturing) processes, and products/applications - while serving as a structured repository for laboratory experiments, hazard assessments, production safety, and environmental sustainability evaluations. These elements are integrated into a Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design innovation and (re)design stage-gate workflow. With programmatic Application Programming Interface access, the Electronic Lab Notebook supports automated workflows, including material property prediction, structured and unstructured data retrieval from chemical and material databases, and integration with external assessment tools. Team members can add materials via a web interface, associate them with Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design stages, and trigger automated assessments or data gap-filling. This modular approach allows a seamless mix of manual and automated assessments while ensuring structured documentation, organization, and traceability. Unlike ad-hoc file-sharing, we expect the Electronic Lab Notebook to foster real-time collaboration, helping decision-making