Regulatory & legal developments involving nano and other emerging chemical technologies
On October 11, 2021, the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety (ANSES) announced the release of a scientific guide to assess the risks posed by nanomaterials in food. According to ANSES, engineered nanomaterials are used in the food sector as:
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As reported in our May 7, 2021, blog item, the European Commission (EC) held a targeted stakeholder consultation as part of its review of the Recommendation on the definition of a nanomaterial. The EC held the consultation to update, test, and verify the preliminary findings of its review, gathering further evidence and feedback…
On June 3, 2021, the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety (ANSES) published an interview with Aurélie Niaudet, who is in charge of assessing the risks associated with physical agents. Niaudet states that nanomaterials have novel properties that “are highly sought after and increasingly exploited, but can also induce specific types…
On December 1, 2020, the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety (ANSES) announced the results of an assessment of R-Nano, France’s national reporting scheme for substances in nanoparticle form. In 2013, France began requiring companies that manufacture, import, and/or distribute a “substance with nanoparticle status” in an amount of at least…
The European Commission’s (EC) Joint Research Center (JRC) recently published a JRC Science for Policy Report entitled Identification of nanomaterials through measurements that is intended to support the implementation of the EC’s Recommendation on the definition of nanomaterials (2011/696/EU). It is a follow-up of a previous JRC Science for Policy Report on concepts and…
The Institute of Technology Assessment of the Austrian Academy of Sciences has published a NanoTrust Dossier entitled “Nano-registries: Country-specific Solutions for Nano-regulation.” While the European Union (EU) has declined to create an EU-wide nano-registry, several EU Member States have adopted their own nano-registries. Belgium and France created stand-alone nano-registries, but Norway and Sweden…
The Institute of Technology Assessment of the Austrian Academy of Sciences has published a NanoTrust Dossier entitled “Safe-by-Design — The Early Integration of Safety Aspects in Innovation Processes.” The Dossier presents an overview of the concepts behind the idea of integrating health or environmental safety considerations in the design of materials, products, or…
On April 29, 2019, the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) announced InnoMat.Life, a joint research project to establish criteria for an efficient assessment of the human health and environmental risks of novel (nano) materials. The Federal Ministry of Education and Research is providing 2.22 million euro to fund the project, which will be…
On April 17, 2019, the Ministry of Ecological and Solidarity Transition issued a press release announcing that France will prohibit foods containing food additive E171 (titanium dioxide) from being placed on the market beginning January 1, 2020. The press release cites the April 15, 2019, opinion from the Agence nationale de sécurité sanitaire de…
The German Environment Agency (UBA) in October 2018 published a study entitled Health Effects of Ultrafine Particles: Systematic literature search and the potential transferability of the results to the German setting. The study notes that ultrafine particles represent the smallest size fractions of particles with sizes from one to about 100 nanometers in aerodynamic…
