A perspective in data and software systems to streamline the transition towards a safer chemical end-of-life management

Chemicals serve pivotal functions in many commercial and consumer products. To manage chemicals and their impact on the environment, chemical risk assessment (CRA) and material flow analysis (MFA) are employed. However, challenges arise in accessing data, particularly in the end-of-life (EoL) stage of products. This perspective manuscript explores how software and data systems can facilitate CRA and MFA at the EoL stage. This contribution reviews regulatory data sources like the Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers, information extraction from academic data via natural language processing, and real-time data to improve understanding of the EoL supply and management chain. Additionally, the manuscript discusses the application of graph neural networks and transfer learning techniques to improve the representation and performance of EoL supply chain models.