Transitioning to safer flame-retardant materials
The European Commission’s HEFESTOS Hub is a pilot substitution centre away from brominated flame retardants.
Plastics Technology Centre AIMPLAS is coordinating the hub, which aims to support industry and regulators to switch to safer and more sustainable alternatives for brominated flame retardants (BFRs).
The Hub offers organisations early access to structured knowledge, technical dialogue and coordinated substitution efforts. It will act as a pilot cooperation framework to explore the feasibility of a future EU-level Substitution Centre focused on BFRs.
It is focusing on key industrial sectors, such as construction, automotive, cables, and other strategic and polymer-intensive applications.
In these sectors, BFRs have been used to meet fire safety requirements for decades, but growing evidence of their persistence, toxicity and potential for bioaccumulation has increased urgency for substitutions.
Many companies have begun exploring alternatives, but most efforts have failed to gain traction due to inconsistent methodologies, limited access to reliable data and lack of a secure environment for cross-sector collaboration.
HEFESTOS is seeking to address these barriers by developing and testing a harmonised, transparent and science‑based framework that enables structured information exchange while fully respecting confidentiality and EU competition law.
The hub aims to generate a consolidated evidence base on BFR uses, alternatives and value chains, identify technical and information gaps, and support the development of a European BFR Substitution Action Roadmap.
This will outline realistic and coordinated pathways for substitution, ensuring industry perspectives from across the value chain are adequately represented.
As coordinator, AIMPLAS will act as an independent technical secretariat, facilitating collaboration among industrial stakeholders, research organisations, regulators and other relevant actors.
