Copper is one of the most important ingredient of friction materials (fms) since it has multi-functionality such as high thermal conductivity, provides structural integrity and film formation, acts as a solid lubricant at elevated temperature etc. among all metals (viz., iron, brass, al etc.) used in fms, it is most favoured in spite of its highest cost. however, it has serious environmental impact. brake wear debris in brake-pads/ shoes etc. ending up in the waterways, has proved to be toxic to the aquatic organisms. u.s. legislation currently requires the use of copper to be reduced to <5% by 2021 (low amounts of copper materials) and to be reduced to 0.5% by 2025 (no copper materials) in the brake materials. other important issue for the environment is noise pollution. the squeal, judder, groan, moan etc. are the issues which are associated with the braking and also with quality of fms. these are hardly studied while reporting research on development of new compositions as fm. the urge for achieving amalgam of better performance and environment friendliness (cu-free with low noise) has created wide scope for research and development in this area. thus, development of copper-free friction materials (fms) with an equivalent or better performance has been a motivation of research from last few years. the several replacement strategies for copper are being pursued but required success not yet reported. in this work, eco-friendly brake-pads were developed with different kinds of stainless steel particles (ssp) to explore the possibility of replacing copper from the brake-pads. a series of six multi-ingredient brake-pads was developed containing 3 vol % (~10 wt.%) ssp (ss304, ss316, ss410 and ss434), ss swarf (ss434) and copper particles as theme ingredients keeping parent formulation identical. the brake-pads were characterized for physical, mechanical, chemical, and thermal properties. tribo-performance was evaluated on a full-scale inertia brake-dynamometer by following jaso c406 test standard. results revealed that almost all the properties were superior to the cu-containing pads including wear. the average coefficient of friction was almost similar for all pads and wear performance was excellent for ss316 and ss304 based brake-pads since these materials had higher surface energy vis-à-vis the better adhesion with the matrix. surface analysis of worn brake-pads was done using a scanning electron microscopy (sem). additionally, noise and vibration (nv) performance of developed pads was evaluated by following sae j 2521 test standards. ssp based brake-pads showed lower rms vibrations compared to cu based pads and comparable noise performance. the overall performance ranking of the brake-pads was done by using ‘multiple objective optimizations by ratio analysis (moora)’ method. finally, it was concluded that some ssps can be suitable choices to replace copper from the brake-pads leading to the best possible solution to develop eco-friendly brake-pads.