Nanotechnology environmental health & Safety standards

By Steven Brown, Convenor of ISO/TC 229/WG 3, Environmental health and safety

The development and applications of new nanotechnologies have the potential to improve greatly the quality of life in areas such as medicine, water purification, environmental remediation and energy production. Some futurists predict nanotechnology will be the next disruptive technology because of the projected ability to impact and change so many areas of material science applications.

According to the US National Nanotechnology Initiative, nanotechnology is the understanding and control of matter at dimensions of roughly 1 to 100 nanometers where unique phenomena enable novel applications.

Nanotechnology involves imaging, measuring, modeling, and manipulating matter at the 1 to 100 nanometer scale. At the nanoscale, the physical, chemical, and biological properties of materials differ in fundamental ways from the properties of individual atoms, molecules or bulk matter.

Nanomaterials currently under development are extremely varied in nature, chemical composition and potential applications. Because of their small size, nanoscale particles have unique properties such as unusual surface features which are highly reactive.

Since half of the atoms in a 5 nm particle are at the surface, these high surface energies allow novel chemical reactions that are different from reactions with the same material in bulk form.

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