Report from the Workshop on Nanotechnologies for Environmental Remediation

This report describes the outcomes from the workshop on ¿Nanotechnologies for Environmental Remediation which took place at the Joint Research Centre, Ispra, on the 16th and 17th April 2007. The workshop brought together leading scientists from across the EU to present their latest work in environmental remediation. The issues of environmental remediation are quite substantial and poorly addressed by conventional technologies. They include access to clean drinking water, removal of airborne pollutants, and the clean-up of industrially contaminated sites. Although there have been a number of laboratory demonstrations of nanotechnology applications for environmental cleanup, there remains the issue of translating these into industrial level processes. Recommendations from the workshop include: development of effective monitoring devices to ensure that remediation processes are working as expected;implementing life-cycle analysis for assessing the environmental consequences of new technologies; stronger support for EU level research in environmental technologies; more fundamental research to better understand naturally occurring processes at the nanoscale and their relation to macroscale phenomena; harnessing the power of natural systems and augmenting where appropriate with nanotechnologies.

RICKERBY David;  MORRISON Mark; 

2007-12-11

Nanoforum

JRC40007

http://nanoforum.org/,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC40007,