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Rare earth elements and several metals formerly uncommon in commerce are being introduced into new products, particularly as nanoscaled materials. Until recently, little attention has been paid to their sustainability issues. This perspective addresses these elements, their commercial uses, health and environment issues, sustainability, and suggests a path forward.

Objective: Although industrial sectors involving semiconductors; memory and storage technologies; display, optical, and photonic technologies; energy; biotechnology; and health care produce the most products that contain nanomaterials, nanotechnology is also used as an environmental technology to protect the environment through pollution prevention, treatment, and cleanup. In this review, we focus on environmental cleanup and provide a background and overview of current practice; research findings; societal issues; potential environment, health, and safety implications; and future directions for nanoremediation. We do not present an exhaustive review of chemistry/engineering methods of the technology but rather an introduction and summary of the applications of nanotechnology in remediation. We also discuss nanoscale zerovalent iron in detail., Data Sources: We searched the Web of Science for research studies and accessed recent publicly available reports from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies and organizations that addressed the applications and implications associated with nanoremediation techniques. We also conducted personal interviews with practitioners about specific site remediations., Data Synthesis: We aggregated information from 45 sites, a representative portion of the total projects under way, to show nanomaterials used, types of pollutants addressed, and organizations responsible for each site., Conclusions: Nanoremediation has the potential not only to reduce the overall costs of cleaning up large-scale contaminated sites but also to reduce cleanup time, eliminate the need for treatment and disposal of contaminated soil, and reduce some contaminant concentrations to near zero-all in situ. Proper evaluation of nanoremediation, particularly full-scale ecosystem-wide studies, needs to be conducted to prevent any potential adverse environmental impacts.

The article examines the U.S.' National Nanotechnology Initiative proposed by scientist Mihail Roco and endorsed by President Bill Clinton, dealing with topics including the efforts to incorporate environment, health, and safety procedures at various development stages and nanotechnology's history.

Highlights: [•] We encourage the safety of nano related workplace through this article. [•] We examine the current state of art about nano related workplace and discuss the challenges and possible solution. [•] Increasing awareness among workers will increase safety at the nano related workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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gThe article focuses on the challenges and opportunities in the field of nanoscale environmental science and technology. The technical and popular literature is chock-full of discoveries of novel physical, chemical, and biological properties associated with materials whose dimensions are in the nanoscale domain. Insofar as environmental applications are concerned, nanomaterials offer the promise of novel materials and processes exhibiting enhanced reactivity toward targeted contaminants, better mobility in environmental media, and easier deployment.

Nanotechnology applications (nanoproducts) have entered the market or are expected to do so in the near future. Robust and science-based criteria are required to appraise and manage their sustainability. This paper describes the approach used to develop a comprehensive and reliable framework of criteria, which was missing until now, for evaluating the sustainability of nanoproducts. A literature review of the frameworks and tools employed to assess nanoproducts sustainability implications was firstly performed to select an initial set of criteria. A survey of experts in the sustainable nanotechnology domain was then conducted to elicit their knowledge in terms of completeness, reliability and validity of the criteria set. Ranking and correlation analyses completed the research by identifying the parameters of major interest as well as the links and dependencies between them. A total of 54 and 65 experts replied to the pilot and main survey, respectively. The reliability and validity of the criteria was assessed with the responses from both questionnaires, whereas the answers from the main survey were used to calculate the relative index of the criteria as well as their correlations. This research resulted in a framework composed of 68 criteria, which are structured into six main areas: (i) economic performance; (ii) environmental impacts, (iii) environmental risk assessment; (iv) human health risk assessment; (v) social implications and (vi) technical performance. This study helps to broaden the understanding on the identification of criteria for sustainability assessments. It also provides those interested in evaluating nanotechnology implications with the basis for real case studies, possibly by integrating available information with the stakeholders using tools that support decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]