Nanoproducts: What is Actually Available to European Consumers?

It remains unclear what is available in Europe when it comes to consumer products containing nanomaterials (NM), which hampers quantitative exposure assessment. To provide an overview of available nanoproducts, we have established The Nanodatabase (www.nanodb.dk), an online inventory of products claimed by manufacturers, importers, retailers, and web-shops to contain nanomaterials. The database currently entails almost 1400 products, 200 of which in the categories of cleaning and personal care. While including basic information about the product (e.g., name, NM used, location of NM in the product), a unique feature of the database is that it provides qualitative exposure/hazard evaluation of individual products based on the NanoRiskCat evaluation framework. Furthermore, the analysis section of the Nanodatabase website allows the user to do their own data sorting (product types, NMs used, number of products, etc.). While silver and titanium dioxide are the most used NMs, we could not identify the NM in more than 60% of all products. The presentation will furthermore include data on potential route of exposure to humans and the environment, results of the NanoRiskCat evaluation, distribution of the products according to their end-of-life fate and limitations of the database.