NanoFASE: Facing up to the challenges of Nanomaterial Exposure Assessment

NanoFASE is preparing Fate and Exposure models for you, to bring Environmental Exposure Assessment for Engineered Nanomaterials to the highest standard. The first Newsletter is now available for download inclusing the editorial for coordinator Claus Svendsen! The NanoFASE consortium invites you to read about our first year of work, meet our Young NanoScientists, and note the dates of workshops where you can share our learning.

 

NanoFASE aims to deliver an integrated environmental Exposure Assessment Framework applicable to engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) to enable understanding and prediction on the “exposure” side of the risk assessment equation (Risk = Exposure x Hazard). We are building novel concepts, approaches and models to underpin scientifically-driven tools of varying complexity and maximal usability.

 

NanoFASE outputs will support both the development of academic understanding, and actual decision-making by regulators, industry and SMEs. Some of the innovative aspects of our 4-year endeavour are to: consider the environmental compartments through which ENMs pass as “reactors” in which the particles are sequentially transformed; employ dynamic multi-media fate modelling; and develop functional fate groups to distinguish the transformed variants of the original ENMs after passage through a reactor. NanoFASE uses real industrial and bespoke aged ENM test sets representing these variants, to develop method, parameter and model catalogues that will overcome current risk assessment roadblocks.

 

Ultimately the NanoFASE tools will all be instantly accessible through an online “Clickable Framework” linking measurement protocols, models and derived parameters. NanoFASE will progress beyond current mass based analysis of production and flows, to a fine-grained spatial and temporal quantification and modelling of ENM forms releases to different waste streams and environmental reactors, in all stages of ENM-enabled product manufacture, use, disposal, and recycling (including accidental releases).

 

This first Newsletter issue surveys the progress of our first year with 42 partners (including 4 Swiss and 7 Non-European) and introduces our Young NanoScientists. You can learn too where to meet us in joint training and dissemination events, like the sp-ICP-MS event in January 2017 at RIKILT (The Netherlands) or our open workshop with ACEnano in September 2017 in Birmingham (UK) linked to the ICEENN 2017 and the US-EU Bridging Communities of Research (CoR) meetings.

 

Please visit our project website: www.nanofase.eu where you will find NanoFASE Scientific Talks on video, further insight into work packages, and deliverable reports and scientific publications as they come out. News and events are announced through our Twitter account @NanoFASE_EU.

 

You can also subscribe to the NanoFASE newsletter here.