Comparison of tools for the sustainability assessment of nanomaterials

Nanomaterials are becoming widely used in areas such as biomedical applications, food, environmental protection, energy production, information technology and agriculture. As such, more research has been conducted on their synthesis and manufacturing from a variety of feedstocks. However, concerns regarding their impact on human health and the environment leads researchers to conduct a variety of ‘sustainability’assessments. The purpose of this paper was to review the current opinion of sustainability assessments concerning nanomaterials. Major assessment tools were reviewed including life cycle assessment, risk assessment and multi-criteria decision analysis, along with subcategories. The review found that each assessment tool did positively contribute to sustainability assessments, but each also had drawbacks of varying degrees. In particular, multi-criteria decision analysis provides the most relevant tool for conducting a sustainability assessment as it can handle criteria of any typology and provide multiple types of decision recommendations, including rankings, scores and classifications.