“S3 is a well equipped sustainability screening method for pharmaceutical and chemical processes, products and sites. For the latter, the relatively large amount of management information and social and political acceptability is relevant”.

S3 can perform relatively quickly a sustainability screening at relatively low effort (two persons weeks) for a relatively large number of relevant items. Such a tool is not yet publicly available and finds a niche between, more labour-intensive quantitative cradle-to-grave LCA oriented tools such as BASF’s SEE Balance and qualitative company reporting tools such as GRI’s Sustainability Reporting Guidelines.

The method is particularly suited for internal discussion and decision making in strategic sustainability issues.
S3 is less suited for external communication and operational and operational management issues.
The screenings for different application types should be treated as completely different methods which can not be compared with each other”.

(Assessment of S3 by TNO, the Dutch Organization for Applied Scientific Research)