Materials are part of our everyday life, requiring resource and energy intensive processes for their production and generating side products and waste with multiple environmental and human health impacts. The European Union is deeply engaged in achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and The European Green Deal has a clear target of zero-pollution for a toxic-free environment. However, achieving these goals largely depends on creating a new paradigm for clean and resource efficient processes and design of materials with better functionality and smart capabilities. The creation of this new paradigm requires interdisciplinary and intersectoral collaboration involving science, innovation, and societal actors.

The goal of this workgroup is to reflect about how future sustainable materials will be created and introduced to our everyday life, including required research activities and skills to be developed by scientists, innovators, policy makers and end-users.

The following questions are relevant to this exercise:

1) Can nature be used as inspiration for future sustainable materials? How bioinspired technologies will emerge in manufacture and applications of materials in engineering, food and nutrition, medicine, pharmaceuticals, and energy?

2) How natural and synthetic components will be combined in future sustainable materials? How biotechnology, nanotechnology, additive manufacture, and artificial intelligence will contribute to this field?

3) How circularity requirements, eco-friendly properties, recycling and remanufacture will be considered already in early stages of materials design and fabrication? How will architecture, design, fashion, and societal well-being have synergies and benefit of these materials?

4) What skills will be needed to create and implement the utilization future sustainable materials?

5) Future sustainable materials must be cost-competitive and largely accessible. What value chains, economic and societal actors can be involved to achieve this goal? Can future sustainable materials be a catalyst for wealth redistribution and influence world order?