NanoFASE is preparing Fate and Exposure models to elevate Environmental Exposure Assessment for Engineered Nanomaterials to the highest standard. The first newsletter is now available for download, including an editorial by coordinator Claus Svendsen! The NanoFASE consortium invites you to learn about our first year of work, meet our Young NanoScientists, and note the dates for workshops where you can share our findings.
NanoFASE aims to deliver an integrated environmental Exposure Assessment Framework for engineered nanomaterials (ENMs). This framework will enable a deeper understanding and prediction of the «exposure» side of the risk assessment equation (Risk = Exposure x Hazard). We are building novel concepts, approaches, and models to support scientifically-driven tools of varying complexity and maximal usability.
NanoFASE outputs will support both academic development and real-world decision-making by regulators, industry, and SMEs. Key innovative aspects of our 4-year project include: considering the environmental compartments through which ENMs pass as “reactors” where the particles are sequentially transformed; employing dynamic multi-media fate modeling; and developing functional fate groups to distinguish transformed variants of ENMs after passage through a reactor. NanoFASE uses real industrial and bespoke aged ENM test sets to develop method, parameter, and model catalogues, overcoming current roadblocks in risk assessment.
Ultimately, the NanoFASE tools will be instantly accessible through an online «Clickable Framework», linking measurement protocols, models, and derived parameters. NanoFASE will go beyond the current mass-based analysis of production and flows to a fine-grained spatial and temporal quantification and modeling of ENM releases to various waste streams and environmental reactors at every stage of ENM-enabled product manufacture, use, disposal, and recycling (including accidental releases).
This first newsletter surveys our progress in the first year with 42 partners (including 4 from Switzerland and 7 from outside Europe) and introduces our Young NanoScientists. Learn where to meet us at joint training and dissemination events, such as the sp-ICP-MS event in January 2017 at RIKILT (The Netherlands) and our open workshop with ACEnano in September 2017 in Birmingham (UK), which is linked to the ICEENN 2017 and the US-EU Bridging Communities of Research (CoR) meetings.
Visit our project website at www.nanofase.eu, where you can find NanoFASE Scientific Talks on video, insights into work packages, and access deliverable reports and scientific publications as they are released. We also announce news and events through our Twitter account @NanoFASE_EU.
You can also subscribe to the NanoFASE newsletter here.