Nanosafety at INERIS : toward a risk assessment over the whole life cycle

INERIS is the French institute on Industrial Risk and Environment (www.ineris.fr). A growing activity on risk related to nanomaterials has been developed since 2004. Our activities are defined through two approaches : 'Health and Environment', and 'Prevention and Innovation'. INERIS works with several communities including industry, academic researchers and governmental agencies and ministries. In that case, NMs are considered as pollutants. Their behavior is studied from the source to the human body or any animal, plant. Both air and liquids are considered. Emission parameters transport and transformation, exposure and bio-distribution are taken into account, both on the base of experiments and modeling. The objective is to contribute to the long term research on risk related to NMs, especially to support future legislation and standardization. That is why most of the experiments are carried out at INERIS on the powders selected by OECD. The purpose of this second approach is to provide operational, easy-to-use and low cost tools for risk prevention. This innovative approach enables to make sustainable and safe products. The main idea is to develop tools to assess the safety on the life cycle of any future nanomanufactured product. For instance, experimental facilities have been developed to assess possible NP risks during the fabrication process ('industry'), the product use ('risk for consumer'), combustion ('end of life'), and accidental risks associated to nanomaterials (explosion, fire, etc.). INERIS researchers and engineers support national (e.g. ANSES) and international working groups, e.g. ISO and CEN standardization, OECD (Working Party on NanoMaterials), and nano-REACH. INERIS has contributed and contributes to several European Research programs (Nanosafe2, Saphir, Nanofol, Nanodevice, Demcamer, Marina, etc.)