Tag Archives: nanomaterials (NMs)

Harmonized nano terminology for environmental health and safety

According to Lynn Bergeson’s April 11, 2016 posting on Nanotechnology Now, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) has published a document about harmonizing terminology for environmental health and safety of nanomaterials,

The European Commission (EC) Joint Research Center (JRC) recently published a report entitled NANoREG harmonised terminology for environmental health and safety assessment of nanomaterials, developed within the NANoREG project: “A common European approach to the regulatory testing of nanomaterials.”

The NANoREG harmonised terminology for environmental health and safety assessment of nanomaterials (PDF)  has an unexpected description for itself on p. 8 (Note: A link has been removed),

Consistent  use  of  terminology  is  important  in  any  field  of  science  and  technology  to ensure  common  understanding  of  concepts  and  tools among  experts  and  different stakeholders, such as regulatory authorities, industry and consumers. Several  terms  in  the  field of  environmental  health  and  safety  (EHS)  assessment of nanomaterials  (hereinafter  NMs) have  been  indeed  defined  or  used  by  the  scientific community and various organisations, including   international   bodies,   European authorities, and industry associations.

This  is true  for multidisciplinary  projects  such  as  NANoREG, which  aims  at supporting regulatory  authorities, and  industry,  in  dealing  with EHS issues  of  manufactured NMs (‘nanoEHS’) (http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/107159_en.html,www.nanoreg.eu). Terminology  thus  plays  an  important  role  in  NANoREG’s internal  process  of producing diverse types of output with regulatory relevance (e.g. physicochemical characterisation and test protocols, grouping and read-across approaches, exposure models, a framework for  safety  assessment  of NMs,  etc.). The  process  takes  place  in a  collaborative  effort across severalNANoREG work packages or tasks,  involvingquite a  few partners. Moreover,  the  different  types  of NANoREG output (‘deliverables’) are  addressed  to  a large  audience  of  scientists,  industry  and  regulatory  bodies,  extending beyond  Europe. Hence, a coordinated initiative has been undertaken by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) to harmonise the use of specific wording within NANoREG.

The objective of this JRC report is to disseminate the harmonised terminology that has been developed and used with in NANoREG. This collection of key terms has been agreed upon by all  project  partners and adopted  in  their  activities  and  related  documents, as recommended by the NANoREG internal Guidance Document.

Accordingly,  Section  2  of  the  report  illustrates  the  methodology  used  i)  to  select  key terms  that  form  the  ‘NANoREG  Terminology’,  ii)  to  develop  harmonised  ‘NANoREG Definitions’, and iii) it also explains the thinking that led to the choices made in drafting a  definition.  In  Section  3,  those  definitions, adopted  by  the  project  Consortium,  are reported  in  a  table  format  and  constitute  the  ‘NANoREG  Harmonised  Terminology’. Section 4 summarises the existing literature definitions that have been used as starting point to elaborate, for each key term, a NANoREG Definition. It also shortly discusses the reason(s) behind the choices that have been made in drafting a definition.

2. Methodology

The NANoREG Harmonised Terminology illustrated in this report is not a ‘dictionary’ [emphasis mine] that collects a long list of well-known, well-defined scientific and/or regulatory terms relevant to  the  field  of nanoEHS.  Rather,  the  NANoREG Harmonised  Terminology  focuses  on  a relatively short list of key terms that may be interpreted in various ways, depending on where the reader is located on the globe or on the reader’s scientific area of expertise. Moreover,  it  focuses  on  few  terms  that  are  specifically relevant  in  a  REACH [Registration, Evaluation, Authorization, & Restriction of Chemicals]  context, which represents the regulatory framework of reference for NANoREG.

This is having it both ways. As I read it, what they’re saying is this: ‘Our document is not a dictionary but here are the definitions we’re using and you can use them that way if you like’.

You can find a link to the ‘harmonisation’ document and one other related document on this page.