Germany Publishes Overview of Field of Advanced Materials

In July 2020, the German Environment Agency (UBA) published a report entitled Advanced materials:  Overview of the field and screening criteria for relevance assessment.  The report describes activities within the project “Advanced materials — Thematic conferences:  Assessment of needs to act on chemical safety” to provide discussion input on approaches to describe, cluster, and prioritize advanced materials.  The aim of the report is to identify relevant advanced materials in regard to chemical safety.  The report states that since the term advanced materials is not clearly defined, a major focus of the investigation is to characterize the use of the term to obtain a reasonable separation within the materials sector.  According to the report, a set of criteria that could be applied to assess the relevance of advanced materials regarding chemical safety was developed and is provided for further discussion and refinement.  In addition, a first description of identified advanced material clusters was performed.