Nano and Other Emerging Chemical Technologies Blog

The Australian Industrial Chemicals Introduction Scheme (AICIS) took effect on July 1, 2020.  Under AICIS, companies that import or manufacture (including introduce) industrial chemicals, or products that release industrial chemicals, into Australia for commercial purposes should first check whether the industrial chemical is listed on the Inventory.  If the chemical is on the Inventory and the introduction meets the terms of Inventory listing, the introduction is automatically...

As reported in our February 5, 2020, blog item, the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH®) Threshold Limit Values for Chemical Substances (TLV®-CS) Committee included carbon nanotubes on its 2020 list of chemical substances and other issues under study.  Being placed on the under study list indicated that the TLV®-CS Committee had selected carbon nanotubes for development of a threshold limit value (TLV®).  ACGIH® has now released...

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) recently published two guidance documents in its series on testing and assessment:...

On July 23, 2020, the European Union (EU) Observatory for Nanomaterials (EUON) published a Nanopinion entitled “Material manufacturing from nano-scaled particles:  moving forward using plants” by Dr. Blaise Tardy, Research Fellow, Bio-Based Colloids and Materials Research Group — Aalto University in Finland.  Dr. Tardy notes that bio-based nanomaterials such as nanocellulose “have shown great promise in forming high performance materials, with the potential to replace...

The July 2020 issue of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Environmental Factor includes an item on a new database that facilitates nanomaterial research.  According to the article, NIEHS grantees constructed PubVINAS, “a large database of structure, chemical property, and activity information on 705 nanomaterials, covering 11 material types.”  The article states that the extensive data on each material “allows scientists...

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has begun a public consultation on a draft document entitled “EFSA Guidance on Technical Requirements for Regulated Food and Feed Product Applications to Establish the Presence of Small Particles Including Nanoparticles.”  The draft Guidance sets out information requirements for applications in the regulated food and feed product areas and establishes criteria for assessing the presence of a fraction of small particles.  EFSA...

On August 19 and 20, 2020, the American National Standards Institute Nanotechnology Standards Panel (ANSI-NSP) will hold a virtual workshop on advanced materials.  ANSI states that advanced materials are of growing interest as there is increasing recognition that size alone does not define the unique properties of a material.  More and more, governments and organizations that originally focused on nanomaterials are now also focusing on advanced materials and emerging...

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has published two nanotechnology standards:...

The Nanodatabase has posted a June 1, 2020, press release announcing that it has added product number 4,000 in its database.  According to the press release, silver is still the nanomaterial most often reported, with titanium and titanium dioxide the second and third most common.  The press release notes that for almost 3,000 products, the type of nanomaterial is unknown, however.  The database includes categories for health and fitness (2,310 products, a little more...

In July 2020, the German Environment Agency (UBA) published a report entitled Advanced materials:  Overview of the field and screening criteria for relevance assessment.  The report describes activities within the project “Advanced materials — Thematic conferences:  Assessment of needs to act on chemical safety” to provide discussion input on approaches to describe, cluster, and prioritize advanced materials.  The aim of the report is to identify relevant advanced...