Lightweight cars, run by nanobatteries, cover 200 miles on a six-minute charge. Small, ultra-sensitive solar panels power homes and offices. The entire Library of Congress fits on a sugar cube-sized chip.
A tiny computer implanted in our bodies monitors for signs of disease. Cancer drugs target only malignant cells -- without side effects. We’ve slowed the aging process, rebuilt the ozone layer, and cleaned up oil spills with toxin-eating nanomachines.
Sci-fi? We’ll see. These are the world-transforming promises of nanotechnology, hailed as the next industrial revolution. Researchers are engineering new materials one atom at a time, endowing them with amazing properties: untold strength, feather weight, super-conductivity, and more.
At nano scale, different laws of physics and chemistry make familiar materials into completely new substances. Aluminum becomes flammable. Carbon, like that in a pencil, turns into a semiconductor. Gold morphs into liquid; zinc becomes transparent.
Our nanotech future has already arrived. Nanoparticles -- 1/1000th the width of a human hair -- are currently ingredients in 502 products we use daily, according to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies’ online inventory. These nano consumer products range from mascara, paint, and surgical dressings to sunscreen, golf clubs, and baby wipes. And research on new products is booming. Nanotech venture-capital investment totaled almost $500 million in 2005.
But some see nanotechnology as a technological tsunami. Nanomaterials are entering our lives without safety research or government regulation. A decades-old “gray-goo” horror scenario describes unstoppable, self-replicatiing nanorobots consuming all life on Eart-great for Hollywood. But the fact is that we have no idea what the nano risks truly are. The unintended consequences of promising innovations such as DDT, asbestos, and CFCs should give us pause, and should have taught us some hard lessons.
Growing evidence suggests that some nanomaterials may be harmful to people, wildlife, and the environment. Because of their size, nanoparticles can easily enter cells, tissues, and organs that larger particles cannot, offering both miraculous and dangerous possibilities. In animal studies, inhaled nanomaterials migrated directly into the brain --and moved from the lungs into the bloodstream.
There are many questions we can’t answer. Could nanoscale silver, which kills microbes, disrupt entire ecosystems by killing bacteria and fungi? How will carbon nanotubes, which are 20 times stronger than steel, be disposed of? Can nanoparticles accumulate as they move up the food chain, causing health problems? In the words of Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY), U.S. House Science Committee chairman, “The potential danger to human beings and the environment is literally incalculable if we don’t understand how nanotechnology can interact with our bodies and our world.”
First and foremost, companies must assess risk -- from worker exposure and consumer use to product disposal. Many manufacturers want to do the right thing, but haven’t known how. It’s taken years for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop a voluntary “stewardship program” under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TOSCA) -- released earlier this month. Their “concept paper” asks manufacturers to submit information on their nanomaterials and risk management practices.
The agency also announced that nanomaterials will be regulated as new chemicals only if they have been forged into a brand-new molecular arrangement -- like “buckyballs,” carbon molecules that look like soccer balls. But the use of say, nano-scale zinc particles in sunscreen would slip by unregulated -- if and when regulations are finally instituted.
These guidelines are merely a feeble stopgap. Only companies that choose to will participate, revealing what they please. Companies manufacturing the riskiest products will avoid the process altogether.
And EPA’s selective nanotech regulation ignores a decade of scientific research revealing that particle size -- not structure -- dictates a material’s qualities, both beneficial and harmful.
These egregious oversights must be addressed when EPA convenes public nanotech meetings in August, and in the upcoming public comment period. We also must demand adequate safety research funding. Just one percent of the $1 billion federal nanotechnology budget was slated for long-term health and environmental research in 2006. Public interest groups want to up that figure to $100 million next year.
With nanotechnology, the government has the opportunity to get it right the first time.
Current chemical regulation is slow, expensive, and ineffective. Last year, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that the EPA has required testing of fewer than 200 of the 62,000 chemicals in commercial use when they first began reviewing chemicals under TOSCA in 1979.
The stakes are too high with nanomaterials to consider a random voluntary approach. Government agencies must establish mandatory safety regulations -- addressing nanotech’s novel properties -- now, before the market is further flooded with nanoproducts. Appropriate regulations will allow companies to confidently invest in these new technologies. We will reap the benefits -- and will avoid serious, unforeseen consequences.
© 2007 Blue Ridge Press
Sharon Guynup released her first book last year, State of the Wild 2006: A Global Portrait of Wildlife, Wildlands, and Oceans. She writes on science and the environment for national magazines and websites.