Within the EC funded LIFE project VERMEER, a new software system was develop with the aim to identify risky substances and suggest safer alternatives as remedy. This strategy was drawn up supporting the idea that for the environmental sustainability and the health of workers and consumers, the substitution of hazardous chemicals and the implementation of greener technologies are increasingly important.

The software, freely available, has been designed taking into account the level of safety, the functional uses and a similarity algorithm as cornerstones of the architecture.

To determine the level of safety, a series of authoritative lists have been taken into account and the safety class emerging from the systematic evaluation and integration of each list was adopted. Then, a hierarchical ontology of functions to enforce and facilitate the substitution process was developed. Each ingredient is associated to a specific functional use. Finally, a read-across analysis enforces the substitution process making the substitution possible even when the ingredient is not included in the archive.

An approach that incorporates together the level of safety, functions and similarity in a high-throughput way, would allow to easily recognize potential functional substitutes meeting the safety and the similarity criteria for a further and deeper evaluation.