Inventory of services for nanosafety assessment and management based on competences, equipment and infrastructure
Résumé
EC4SafeNano is a 2016-2019 Coordination and Support Action, funded by the European Commission (Grant Agreement No 723623), coordinated by INERIS, and operated together by major European human health and environmental risk institutes with the support of associated partners, gathering stakeholders in the field of Nanotechnologies (regulators, industry, civil society, NGOs, service providers etc.). EC4SafeNano aims to bridge the gap between scientific knowledge on hazard and risk, and ‘fit-for-purpose’ risk management tools and strategies. The main objective of EC4SafeNano will be to develop and promote a harmonized vision of expertise and services in risk assessment and management, to enable the safe development and commercialization of nanotechnology and develop a sustainable structure to deliver these services. In this respect, two work packages were dedicated to gathering information on stakeholder needs and available services, by means of an online survey. Information was collected on the ability to provide technical services for testing and measuring, and/or to perform consultancy and desk top studies. For these services, detailed information on available technical equipment, software tools, methods used and application fields was requested. Alongside specific technical details, the service providers were asked to give a general overview of their current and future offers for nanosafety services by scoring a matrix table. The online survey resulted into 82 responses from 22 countries, including 2 non-European countries. An overview of current types of services demonstrated that testing and measuring and consultancy studies represented the majority of the offered services (each >20% of total), followed by training (12%). Across all the types of services, physicochemical characterization (12.5%), emission studies (6.8%), fate (5.1%), human health hazard studies (5.7%), occupational exposure assessment (8.8%), occupational risk assessment (5.2%), occupational risk management (5.5 %) and risk prevention (5.7%) were the main application fields for nanosafety. The information from service providers will be compared to the inventory of stakeholder needs, as part of a fit and gap analysis in another work package, and provide the basis for a catalogue of services to be offered by the EC4Safenano Centre. We will present the set-up of the survey to create an inventory of the competences and infrastructure of service suppliers, as well as the obtained results.