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Feds Urge Probe Of Nano “Life Cycles”

by Gwyneth K. Shaw | Oct 28, 2011 12:08 pm

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Posted to: Environment, Nanotech, Science/ Medical

National Nanotechnology Initiative (NHI Nanoblog) The National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) has released its latest blueprint for fostering the safe development of nanotechnology, giving fresh emphasis to the idea of studying a product or application from birth to death.

With this latest plan for tracking environmental health and safety issues in the burgeoning nanotechnology field, the NNI—a program that’s supposed to promote collaboration among the scores of federal agencies with skin in this game—is stepping up the call for more research, better data and more pointed efforts to educate the public.

The plan focuses on human exposure, human health and the environment, incorporating risk assessment and management, the development of predictive models and the measurement of nanomaterials into that matrix. It calls for better ways to characterize the super-small materials that are increasingly found in consumer products, as well as testing them to identify potential hazards. (Read the administration’s blog post about the report here.)

It also highlights what’s fast becoming a mantra within the world of nano safety: The need to look at the entire impact of an application or product, from the workers who manufacture it to how the consumer uses it to the way it’s disposed of.

“We have focused on a life-cycle assessment,” said Treye Thomas of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, who co-chaired the committee that helped put the report together. Thomas spoke, with other federal officials and some industry representatives, during an NNI-hosted webinar this week unveiling the document.

Looking at “life cycles” is something safety mavens have been urging. Most toxicological research on nanomaterials, at least so far, tends to focus on a single substance at a particular point in time. Some testing of consumer products is being done—like setting a nano-flame retardant on fire and seeing what’s released—but there’s very little information about what happens if you incinerate a smartphone that has carbon nanotubes incorporated into its circuits.

Nanotechnology leverages super-small particles (a nanometer is a billionth of a meter) to create new products. These materials can make bike frames lighter and stronger and sunscreen more transparent on the skin, as well as new medical instruments and medicines that can save lives.

There is broad agreement that nanomaterials have lots of potential for a wide variety of applications. But shrinking these substances can change their properties; scientists are struggling to figure out whether, how and why that shift can make them dangerous in the process.

“We need to recognize that this is going to be a big hill to climb,” Shaun Clancy of the Evonik Degussa Corp. said of the effort to understand life-cycle issues. Clancy said he spoke at the webinar as a general representative of the industry perspective.

Lynn Bergeson, a lawyer who works on nano regulatory issues (and authors a well-read blog on the subject) called the life-cycle emphasis “extremely important” and said it “enhances the document and makes it even more relevant to the public and to public health.”

During the webcast, Bergeson also emphasized the need for better communication to the public on what’s being examined, what the results are and how that effects the products they’re already using or might consider buying. That extends to questions over whether the U.S. should be using a hard-and-fast definition of “nanomaterial,” like the one just released—amid controversy—by the European Commission.

“There is an abundance of confusion over what the heck a nanomaterial is, and why do I care?” she said.

In many ways, the document is a guidepost for federal agencies, which are struggling to deal with the questions posed by many nanomaterials without clamping down in ways that either don’t work or go too far. But ultimately, the thick report is just paper, and the true test of all of this work will be in what kinds of actions it prompts.

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