Advances in Recycling & Waste Management

The Nanotechnological Revolution and the Complexity of Waste: The Possibility of Using the OECD Protocol as an Alternative to Nanowaste Risk Management

Abstract

Wilson Engelmann, Daniele Weber S Leal and Raquel Von Hohendorff

Nanotechnologies are in the process of increasing their development in research and in industries. Thus, there is also an increase in the production of waste in nanoscale. There is an alert point: as the challenges brought by nanotechnologies are not yet completely known, given the different physicochemical characteristics of the nano scale, the same will happen in the production of nano waste. Can garbage containing nano particles be added to waste with larger particles? What are the risks and how to establish the regulation? The paper intends to show that the documents already produced by the OECD-The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) since the year 2006, in the series of studies entitled "Series on the Safety of Manufactured Nanomaterials", focusing on the safety assessment of nanomaterials, could be an alternative for the lack of regulation. In fact, 80 specific documents have already been published in this regard, and one study, specifically, entitled “Nanomaterials in Waste Streams: Current Knowledge on Risks and Impacts”, handling waste. These documents may serve to develop a non-legislative regulatory framework through Dialogue between the sources of Law, anchored in legal pluralism (Gunther Teubner) in order to organize flexible legal rules, but in conditions of disciplining the safe treatment of nano waste.