Ashok Vaseashta
Institute for Advanced Sciences Convergence & Int’l Clean Water Institute
USA
Title: Risk Assessment, Safety and Sustainability by Design
Biography
Biography: Ashok Vaseashta
Abstract
From a technology standpoint, nanomaterials offer significant advantages due to their unique characteristics resulting from reduced dimensionality. Furthermore, advances in material synthesis have provided the means to control or even manipulate the transitional characteristics. Consequently, various “designer” materials with desired properties have recently been fabricated. Dual-use nature of technology coupled with the ability to functionalize with a plethora of biological configurations pose a significant safety and security concerns. Furthermore, a life cycle analysis of nanomaterials is largely unknown; and nanomaterials resulting from the laboratories, manufacture, and even incidental events pose serious concerns. Notwithstanding such concerns, the beneficial uses of nanomaterials offer a challenging scenario for policy-makers, researchers, and industrialists aliketo propose and implement viable alternatives for sustainable development in terms of keeping up with the latest technological innovations, social responsibility, and“being green”.With so much at stake, it is prudent to challenge conventional wisdom and investigate a new set of strategies that employa nexus of technological innovations, in conjunction with “acceptable” risk assessment and a strategic transformation in “use, reuse, and recycle” as effective management tools to address “design safety, security, and sustainability”. “Sustainability by design”employsstrategic transformations towards ensuring that humans andthe environment can simultaneously flourish on the Earth. Authors have investigated life-cycle-assessment based on the characterization, assessment, and management of risk to assess impacts on human and environmental health from a safety and sustainability standpoint.This presentation offers strategic solutions to a life cycle based approach to nanomaterials and foresight tools, already developed by the authors, to offer possible solutions pathways. The development of a nano-materials safety data sheet (n-MSDS) is being researched by the authors as one such transformation tool needed to provide guidance on the impact of engineered and incidental nanomaterials being introduced and recycled in our supply chain.