Nanotech an environmental threat

Nanomachine courtesy Unisciences

The growing use of nanoparticles is causing a new form of uncontrollable and unregulated pollution that has the potential to harm the environment, a leading scientist warned the CleanUp 09 conference in Adelaide.

Their extremely small size – only billionths of a metre – makes them ideal for use in a growing range of industries and products, but it also allows them to escape through filters and into our rivers, oceans and even to penetrate our bodies.

Dr Tomas Vanek from the Laboratory of Plant Biotechnologies in the Czech Republic believes we must better understand the damage that this ‘nanopollution’ can cause and the urgent need to control it.

Body creams and toothpastes increasingly contain nanoparticles, as do a range of commercial products and a variety of materials. Nanoparticles are also used in industrial processes, and this range of applications allows them to be exposed to the environment through many different pathways, according to Dr Vanek.

“Nanoparticles often end up washed down the drain where they can pass through sewage treatment plant filters and into our oceans and rivers, potentially contaminating our food and water supplies. Nanomaterial can also be applied directly to ecosystems in order to clean up other unwanted pollutants”, he said.

“The use of these tiny particles of metal and chemicals is quite new and we still don’t know whether they’re dangerous and how, or if, we can clean them up.”

He says the world needs to urgently begin preparing to regulate and, if necessary, restrict the widespread use of nanomaterials.

“In the past we used many chemicals in agriculture and industry, only to find out afterwards they were damaging to human health and the environment. We do not want to make the same mistake with nanotechnologies – releasing unknown materials that turn out to be toxic and then finding they are difficult or even impossible to recall or make safe,” said Dr Vanek.

Dr Vanek and his team are one of the first groups in the world to show that ‘nanopollution’ can harm plants. They tested commonly used nanoparticles - titanium dioxide, zinc peroxide, aluminium oxide, fullerenes and carbon graphite fibres - on tobacco plant cells and found that at varying levels the molecules were toxic to the plant.

“This is a new area of research and much more study is required, but we need to understand whether nanoparticles are dangerous to the environment that we can create guidelines to safely use them,” said Dr Vanek.

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