ViSS at SSbD2026: new approaches to the social assessment of PHBV solutions
At the IRISS International SSbD Conference in Stockholm, KVeloce presented four methodological innovations from the ViSS social assessment.
The ViSS project was presented at the SSbD2026 Conference in Stockholm, Sweden, organised by the IRISS International SSbD Community. The conference is a key meeting point for researchers, industry representatives and policymakers from across Europe working on Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design (SSbD), an approach that integrates safety and sustainability considerations from the earliest stages of product and process development.
In his presentation, José Benedicto focused on the social dimension of sustainability, an area that is often less developed than its environmental and economic counterparts. He showed how ViSS has approached the social assessment of its novel PHBV-based solutions, and highlighted four methodological innovations introduced by the project.
The first is the combination of two levels of analysis that are usually carried out separately: the social assessment of the organisations involved and the social assessment of the product itself. Bringing them together gives a more complete picture of the social performance of the solutions. Building on this, the project has applied a weighting methodology, so that the different social aspects considered can be given relative importance within the overall assessment.
The third innovation concerns the use of composite scoring to handle the complexity of qualitative indicators, which are common in social assessment but difficult to compare and combine. Finally, ViSS has introduced a flag system that highlights potential violations which would otherwise be masked when results are aggregated into overall scores. This ensures that critical issues remain visible to decision-makers.