Environmental Health and Safety of Engineered Nanomaterials

With rapid progress in nanotechnology and engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) being increasingly incorporated into consumer and industrial products, it is important to understand their impact on environmental health and safety (namely EHS). There are two major issues from the EHS perspective. One is exposure, namely, the interaction of humans and ENMs and the potential adverse effects on a wide range of organisms in the environment. The second one is to link the physicochemical properties of ENMs to their hazards at levels of nano/bio interface, including interactions of ENMs with cell membranes, biomolecules, tissues, organs, organisms, populations, ecosystems, etc. Understanding these issues will yield knowledge of material properties that are potentially hazardous that allows us to design and synthesize safer nanomaterials by controlling these properties, in other word, safer by design. Among the challenges, the identification of hazardous ENM properties is important due to the large number of ENMs and the diverse physicochemical properties that contribute to detrimental interactions at the nano/bio interface, such as shape, size, chemical composition, surface charge, aspect ratio, dissolution, redox activity, surface coatings, crystallinity, and the state of agglomeration or dispersal. The adverse effects manifest at the level of DNA, proteins, interstitial spaces, organelles, the circulation, and various tissues and organs, leading to disorders and biological adverse effects at a variety of different strata in the environment. In this chapter, we discussed the progress in our understanding of the properties that influence their adverse outcomes to humans and the environmental organisms. Based on this information, safer-by-design approaches have been developed to control the toxic properties. The information is important for safer and sustainable development of nanotechnology in nanomedicine and environmental applications.