The NanoRelease project was initiated in partnership with US Environmental Protection Agency and the American Chemistry Council to foster the safe development of nanomaterials by supporting development of methods to understand the release of nanomaterials used in products. The first action of the partnership was to establish a steering committee. Minutes of each meeting and conference call are reviewed and approved by the Steering and posted here.
Objectives developed by the Steering Committee
- Provide focus to broad policy debates by working through scenarios under which specific engineered nanomaterials might be released from products;
- Examine the full life cycle of products that might act to release nanomaterials;
- Catalogue and disseminate published and unpublished data and methods (that meet minimum criteria) used to evaluate release scenarios;
- Develop “state of the science” reports about release measurement for the specific material types chosen that describe what is known and what research gaps exist; and
- Enable improvements, standardization, and widespread use of methods by carrying out tests using reference nanomaterial-matrix and positive controls in a “round robin” or similar approach.
Work Plan
The project has proceeded in three phases with the following ultimate goals:
- Phase 1: Nanomaterial Selection—list of priority nanomaterials and initial study material
- Phase 2: Methods Evaluation—set of methods and state-of-science document
- Phase 3: Interlaboratory Studies—methods refinement for documentary standards development
Publications
Froggett 2012 Review of release from solids embedded or coated with nanomaterials NanoRelease Background Doc
Nowack et al 2013 Potential release scenarios for carbon nanotubes used in composites. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412013000834
Canady et al 2013 Literature review and interviews with labs doing release work for MWCNT – polymer nanorelease-consumer-products-phase-2-5-report
Froggett et al 2014 Review of literature reporting release for a nanomaterial composite www.particleandfibretoxicology.com/content/11/1/17
Kingston et al 2014 Release Characteristics of Selected Carbon Nanotube Polymer Composites. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.carbon.2013.11.042
Kaiser et al 2014 Methods for the Measurement of Release of MWCNTs from MWCNT-Polymer Composites
Harper, et al 2015 Measuring Nanomaterial Release from Carbon Nanotube Composites:. http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/617/1/012026/meta
Wohlleben et al 2017 NanoRelease: Pilot interlaboratory comparison of a weathering protocol applied to resilient and labile polymers with and without embedded carbon nanotubes http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0008622316309824
NanoRelease Data Hub – public release of data from the weathering module of NanoRelease Consumer Products