Environmental safe and sustainable-by-design advanced materials: a case of oxide-perovskite

In the European Union (EU) a new framework was established in December of 2022, the “Safe and Sustainable-by-Design” framework. This framework was created to enhance the risk assessment of new chemicals in order to avoid regrettable substitutions, and integrate sustainable development goals in the invention of new thechnologies. To implement SSbD, interpretations of the framework were developed to facilitate its implementation. An example is the European Joint Research Centre (JRC) that developed an interpretation of SSbD. Perovskite are a broad class of crystalline materials of ABX3 chemical composition, where A and B are metal cations and X is a anion. The application of perovskites nowadays is very extensive from ferroelectrics, superconductors, solar cells and automotive catalysts. Oxide-perovskites are more specifically formed in the ABO3 formation. This thesis aims at presenting a case study of automotive catalysts oxide-perovskites LanthanumCobalt-Nickel (LaCoNi) and providing an overview of the JRC interpretation of the SSbD framework using the LaCoNi case study with a focus on environmental safety. For this, ecotoxic studies on the metal ions composing the perovskites and the material itself were conducted. The results were related to the JRC framework and a discussion on the relevance of the results was done to provide some insight of the application of the JRC SSbD framework. The ecotoxic study was conducted on R. subcapitata freshwater algae as well as D. magna freshwater daphids. The results showed an EC50 of 30.2 mg/L for LaCoNi on the algae and no effects on the daphnids in concentrations up-to 100 mg/L. These results showed that LaCoNi could be potentially harmful to the environment because of the leachability of nickel and cobalt, and that many more studies on the effect on human would be needed as required by the JRC framework. The applicability of the JR