Our “Nano” Right to Know

But here’s why GMOs should be envi­ous of nanopar­ti­cles: The pub­lic has let the nano indus­try off the hook pretty easy, in my opin­ion. Despite many sim­i­lar­i­ties between GMOs and nanopar­ti­cles, the move­ment to label one has got­ten big­ger and big­ger and big­ger… (we reached 1 mil­lion sig­na­tures; or was it 394? I digress) but not the other.   

Outside of some niche consumer-safety groups, there is lit­tle con­ver­sa­tion about label­ing nano, and leg­is­la­tion remains very murky. Last June, the FDA issued a draft guid­ance advis­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers on how to use and define nan­otech­nol­ogy as “a first step toward pro­vid­ing reg­u­la­tory clar­ity on FDA’s approach to nan­otech­nol­ogy.” Fail. Then last week, the FDA released two sets of pro­posed rules for food and cos­metic com­pa­nies work­ing with nanopar­ti­cles. More on that, but first a bit about why con­sumers went from car­ing to not car­ing that much about nanotechnology.  

Nanotechnology’s check­ered past

In 2006, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) released a report on the wide­spread use of nanotechnology—which manip­u­lates par­ti­cles to be between 1 and 100 nanome­tres (that’s really, really small).

It found that nanopar­ti­cles appear in myr­iad per­sonal care prod­ucts and raised con­cerns about poten­tial health risks because accord­ing to the FDA, “due to their small size and extremely high ratio of sur­face area to vol­ume, nan­otech­nol­ogy mate­ri­als often have chem­i­cal or phys­i­cal prop­er­ties that are dif­fer­ent from those of their larger coun­ter­parts, includ­ing increased chem­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal activity.”  

After this report came out, con­sumers looked more crit­i­cally at nanopar­ti­cles, par­tic­u­larly nano tita­nium diox­ide, which the sun care indus­try com­monly uses to improve the con­sis­tency of min­eral sunscreens. Vocal con­cerns from nat­ural prod­ucts con­sumers, par­ents espe­cially (could their kids’ sen­si­tive skin absorb these tiny par­ti­cles?), prompted many man­u­fac­tur­ers to refor­mu­late prod­ucts like sun­screen. That’s when brands’ labels and web­sites started to tout the use of non-nano ingredients.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at Delicious Living.