It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distrib...
HEFESTOS is a European Commission–funded initiative created to support and advance the substitution of Brominated Flame Retardants (BFRs) in key industrial sectors such as construction, automotive and electrical applications.
BFRs are widely used to improve fire safety in polymeric materials but several of them raise serious concerns due to their persistence, toxicity and potential for bioaccumulation.
HEFESTOS supports industry in transitioning toward safer alternatives through harmonised, transparent and science-based methodologies, operating within a trusted, non-competitive and legally compliant cooperation framework.
Goals
Across Europe, hazardous chemical substitutions often occur in a fragmented and uncoordinated manner. Companies assess alternatives individually, data remains siloed, and cross-sector dialogue is constrained by confidentiality and competition law concerns.
At the same time, regulators require robust and comparable evidence to ensure that substitutions are technically feasible, economically realistic and environmentally viable, avoiding regrettable substitutions that simply replace one risk with another.
HEFESTOS responds to this structural gap by establishing a trusted, non-competitive and legally compliant cooperation framework that enables structured information exchange without compromising commercial sensitivities.
1. Assess the feasibility of establishing an EU-level Substitution Centre that strengthens cooperation while fully preserving confidentiality and compliance with EU competition law. The objective is to demonstrate how a structured and moderated interaction model can clarify sector-specific challenges, define stakeholder roles and outline realistic substitution pathways, laying the foundations for a credible and operational EU mechanism supporting the transition toward safer chemical alternatives.
2. Establish a dedicated substitution group operating under clear safe-cooperation principles to support stakeholders and the European Commission in advancing the replacement of Brominated Flame Retardants with safer alternatives. This includes consolidating existing knowledge on BFR uses, mapping relevant value chains, identifying key technical and information gaps, and ensuring that all analytical outputs are aggregated, anonymised and competition compliant.
HEFESTOS is designed as a trusted cooperation environment that enables open participation without compromising commercially sensitive information.
NEWS
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley ...