In view of rising ecological awareness, materials development is primarily aimed at improving the performance and efficiency of innovative and more elaborate materials. However, a materials performance figure of merit should include essential aspects of materials: environmental impact, economic constraints, technical feasibility, etc. Thus, we promote the inclusion of sustainability criteria already during the materials design process. With such a holistic design approach, new products may be more likely to meet the circular economy requirements than when traditional development strategies are pursued. Using catalysts for water electrolysis as an example, we present a modelling method based on experimental data to holistically evaluate processes.

This work was supported by the Fraunhofer Internal Programs under Grant No. Attract 170-600006. This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) Projektnummer 388390466-TRR 247 within the Collaborative Research Centre/Transregio 247 "Heterogeneous Oxidation Catalysis in the Liquid Phase". Open access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.