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Environmental Impacts and Safety Concerns of Carbon Nanomaterials

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Abstract

In the last couple of decades, carbon nanomaterials have been a hot topic in research, and while they start appearing in commercial products, their environmental impacts are still far from being understood. The life-cycle assessment (LCA) is one way of assessing the environmental burdens of a product throughout its lifecycle on the environment and human beings. This chapter starts with an introduction to the LCA technique, from its origins to the ideas behind its holistic approach that, by investigating the whole lifecycle, avoids shifting the environmental burden from one life stage to the others (e.g. from production to disposal). The chapter then focuses then on a review of the published LCA studies on carbon nanomaterials evaluating commonalities among studies and limitations. Findings suggest that carbon nanomaterials production is more energy demanding than their traditional counterparts, but they can have a lower environmental profile when their whole lifecycle is considered. The last part focuses on the limitations of the LCA in relation to nanomaterials, and the difficulties in understanding their toxicological impacts when released to the environment.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Background system comprises processes that are part of the system but not under direct control of the producers (e.g. electricity or raw material production).

  2. 2.

    Foreground system is defined in the LCA theory as “the processes which are under the control of the decision-maker for which an LCA is carried out”, i.e., the process in place to manufacture/perform the product/service. Together with the Background system (see footnote 1) forms the whole investigated system.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bioprocess, Environmental and Chemical Technologies Research Group, Faculty of Engineering, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK

    Matteo Cossutta & Jon McKechnie

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  1. Matteo Cossutta
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  2. Jon McKechnie
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Correspondence to Matteo Cossutta .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Kanagawa Institute of Industrial Science and Technology, Ebina, Kanagawa, Japan

    Satoru Kaneko

  2. Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Kagoshima University, Kagoshima, Japan

    Masami Aono

  3. Center for Surface Science and Nanotechnology, University Politehnica of Bucharest, București, Romania

    Alina Pruna

  4. Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Musa Can

  5. Shibaura Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan

    Paolo Mele

  6. Faculty of Engineering, Ataturk University, Erzurum, Turkey

    Mehmet Ertugrul

  7. Japan Advanced Chemicals, Atsugi, Kanagawa, Japan

    Tamio Endo

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Cossutta, M., McKechnie, J. (2021). Environmental Impacts and Safety Concerns of Carbon Nanomaterials. In: Kaneko, S., et al. Carbon Related Materials. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7610-2_11

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