Active pharmaceutical ingredients and agrochemicals are indispensable to modern society, yet increasing scrutiny of their environmental impact shifted the focus toward a new space of innovation: the design of small molecules that combine high performance with environmental biodegradability. While the “Safe and Sustainable by Design” (SSbD) paradigm is widely embraced, its practical implementation is hindered by one major bottleneck: the absence of rapid, high-throughput, and decision-grade testing frameworks for early-stage chemical research.

We address this gap with a disruptive read-across framework that leverages activated sludge degradation data to predict the environmental fate of chemicals in soil. Our proof-of-concept demonstrates that such read-across experiments provide high predictive accuracy for soil degradation and significantly outperform current in-silico prediction tools. By integrating these empirical metrics into the discovery phase, we enable a transition from reactive assessment to proactive molecular design. This approach transforms sustainability from an aspirational goal into a practical design criterion, establishing new standards for innovation across pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries.