Advanced materials promise technical solutions to support sustainable transformation. They play an important role for a variety of environmental topics worked on at UBA, such as energy transition, circular economy and chemical safety. Various sectors can benefit from the use of advanced materials, but they can also face challenges. The UBA position paper describes the area of tension between the promising use and possible challenges for environmental and health protection and other sustainability dimensions, illustrates this with various examples and derives corner stones for a safe and sustainable life cycle of advanced materials.