This strategy allows to improve the environmental sustainability and the health of workers and consumers, providing forward-looking approaches in line with the green chemistry paradigm.

The software, freely available, is designed for the food contact materials (FCM) sector with the aim to identify risky substances and stimulate their replacement with safer alternatives.

The approach applied for the substitution takes into account three main parameters: the level of safety, the similarity algorithm and the identification of hazardous structural groups/alerts. To determine the level of safety, ToxEraser automatically verifies whether the substance of interest is included in two existing lists with safe chemicals, i.e. (i) Annex I of the EU Regulation 10/2011 containing the substances allowed for use as starting products in plastic FCM and (ii) the US-EPA Safer Chemical Ingredient List (SCIL). By including a read-across analysis, ToxEraser also identifies within each of these two lists substances that are structurally similar to the substance of interest. Finally, a series of structural alerts have been implemented in order to detect possible evidence of toxicity for different toxicological endpoints.