A European research programme is combining industrial monitoring, material substitution, digital modelling, and worker training in an attempt to reduce exposure to carcinogenic and emerging airborne pollutants across energy-intensive manufacturing sectors.
Fraunhofer ITEM is one of 17 partners participating in BRISA, a four-year Horizon Europe programme receiving approximately €8 million of EU funding. The project began in June 2026 and will run until May 2030, with five industrial demonstrations covering ceramics, metal casting, mineral processing, tyre recycling, and plastics recycling.
BRISA — Breakthrough Research on Industrial Safety Against Airborne Carcinogens and Emerging Pollutants — is coordinated by Spanish ceramics research organisation AICE. The programme is intended to address pollutants that can be difficult to manage through periodic workplace sampling alone, particularly where production conditions create changing combinations of dust, volatile compounds, nanoparticles, and other airborne contaminants.
The pilot programme deliberately spans different process environments. Ceramics production will be tested in Spain, sand casting in Germany, end-of-life tyre recycling in Poland, mineral fillers and plastics processing in Türkiye, and plastics recycling in the Netherlands. The range gives the consortium several opportunities to discover where a promising laboratory technique becomes considerably less cooperative once heat, dust, variable feedstocks, maintenance, and production schedules are introduced.
One strand of the programme focuses on identifying and characterising the pollutants generated inside industrial processes. Regulatory, toxicological, and exposure information will be brought into harmonised datasets and protocols, giving researchers a more consistent basis for comparing measurements and identifying which substances or operating conditions require intervention.
Another part addresses the hazard before it becomes an exposure problem. BRISA will investigate material and process substitutions including lower-silica feedstocks, bio-based binders, modified mineral materials, and safer recycled polymers. Reducing the source of a contaminant is generally more robust than attempting to control it after it has entered the workplace atmosphere, although industrial substitutions have to preserve product performance, process stability, quality, and cost.
That qualification burden is easy to underestimate. A replacement foundry binder may produce fewer undesirable emissions yet still prove unacceptable if it changes casting quality, cure behaviour, scrap rates, or tooling requirements. The same applies to ceramics and recycling processes, where a material chosen primarily for occupational health reasons still has to survive production economics.
Monitoring provides the second technical layer. BRISA is developing semi-fixed sensing equipment, wearable devices, and stack-monitoring systems intended to provide more continuous information than conventional periodic measurements. Data from those systems will feed AI-supported digital twins designed to identify changing exposure patterns and predict conditions associated with higher risk.
Continuous measurement could provide considerably more process detail than a shift-average result. A foundry does not generate the same airborne load while moulds are prepared, metal is poured, castings are knocked out, and equipment is cleaned. Recycling facilities experience similar variation as materials move through shredding, separation, transport, and storage equipment.
Connecting exposure data to specific production states could allow engineering controls to be targeted at the operation creating the problem rather than broadly applied across an entire plant. Ventilation rates, enclosure arrangements, maintenance routines, and process settings could then be assessed against measured exposure instead of being treated as static safeguards.
The model is only as credible as the information entering it. Industrial air measurements can be influenced by sensor location, temperature, humidity, particle size, ventilation, equipment condition, and worker movement. Feeding unreliable measurements into a sophisticated predictive model simply moves uncertainty further downstream, which is why BRISA combines sensing development with toxicological assessment and harmonised measurement protocols.
Fraunhofer ITEM will act as a scientific safety gatekeeper, assessing risks associated with chemicals and airborne particles as new materials and technical interventions are developed. That function is intended to reduce the possibility of eliminating one established hazard only to introduce another substance whose health effects are less well understood.
Worker training forms another part of the programme, including immersive training and human-in-the-loop warning systems. The practical relevance is substantial because industrial exposures frequently change during cleaning, maintenance, breakdowns, charging, emptying, and other activities outside normal steady-state production.
A process may be well contained while a machine is closed and operating correctly, then become a much less controlled environment when guards are removed or accumulated material has to be cleaned manually. Monitoring that distinguishes between those states can expose weaknesses that conventional scheduled sampling misses.
BRISA has set ambitions beyond its five demonstrations, including potential deployment across 600 to 800 industrial facilities by 2035 and an effect on more than 45,000 workers. The consortium is also targeting substantial reductions in workplace exposure and hazardous-material use.
Those figures are project objectives, not demonstrated results. The first meaningful evidence will come from the industrial pilots, where sensors must remain accurate, digital models must produce useful predictions, and alternative materials must continue making products to specification.
The project has until 2030 to establish whether those components can operate together. If they do, the more consequential shift will be from occasional occupational exposure measurement towards continuous process-level management — treating airborne contamination as something that can be detected and controlled while production is running rather than documented after exposure has already occurred.
