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Sept. 26, 2003 — As the Greenpeace report, “Future Technologies, Today’s Choices” has caused some comment, I thought it would be helpful to lay out our position more fully. We see a mixture of promise and concerns.
Technology can do great things but cannot deliver on its own. We have the knowledge and technology to feed everyone, but it doesn’t happen. There are still people who go to bed hungry — people in Britain and America, never mind the many, many more in developing countries. Clearly the availability of technology is not the only issue — simple low-tech technologies like supplying clean water don’t happen for billions despite much fine rhetoric.
Clearly these are factors of politics, finance and will which are complex and not analyzed quickly. However, they serve as an indication that the possibility of something good coming from technology does not mean that it necessarily will.
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How does this apply to the here and now of nanotech? Well, for one thing, it means that claims about the benefits of future technology development need to be rooted in a solid appraisal of whether they are actually going to happen, otherwise it’s a con. If nanotech can help deliver affordable, clean energy like solar power to billions who don’t have it — and would otherwise use polluting energy sources — Greenpeace will be cheering, but we’re not naive enough to believe that cheaper solar cell manufacture on its own will make it happen.
Further, campaigning to stop things — as Greenpeace frequently does — is fundamentally unsatisfying. We would like to see answers to problems — technology has the ability to deliver some of these answers. We would like to see the central priorities of nanotech being that of delivering social and environmental benefits, whilst being mindful of the real-world realities.
Most technology development chases income from the already-rich. That’s because for many Western economies in the last two decades, scientific innovation has been explicitly linked to revenue raising, and intellectual property rights arrangements have supported that. Inevitably, this downplays technology applications for some environmental improvements or meeting the needs of developing countries where markets are poorly developed or nonexistent.
In that sense, nanotech is no different from many other technology developments. But what marks out nanotech is that its potential is so huge for either good or bad, getting it right is a prize worth working for. We have called for direct public involvement in the agenda setting for the priorities of nanotech R&D and are awaiting responses from the (UK) ministers and research councils.
Of the near-term concerns, Greenpeace sees specific issues around nanoparticles. As a general introduction please see this essay written by Vicki Colvin, director of the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology at Rice University.
The European Union is funding a significant research project, NANOSAFE (PDF, 33.3 KB), on safety of airborne nanoparticles.
The challenge with nanoparticles is that the hazards are not fully understood because the properties are new. The novel properties of clusters of atoms at the nanoscale, which make them so interesting commercially, also means that their environmental and health properties, virtually by definition, aren’t understood either. Greenpeace has not called for a ban on nanoparticles, but a moratorium until the hazards are characterized and understood.
This may represent significant technical challenges because properties can change dependent on size, and possibly even manufacturing process. Getting data that is genuinely reflective of environmental fate will also depend on the form of the nanoscale materials. Incorporation of nanotubes into plastic composites, for example, may render them harmless in the near term, but what about their long-term fate? The answer may be that they’re perfectly safe, but we ought to have some idea, and some data, before commercial-scale production ramps up.
It has been argued that nanoparticles have been with us for millennia. That may or may not be true, but even so I don’t think this addresses a key difference — in prospect is very large-scale production. All sorts of dodgy things were done in the past that are not a good justification for doing something now. It’s believed that the Romans used to use lead acetate as a food sweetener leading to extensive lead poisoning. Just because things used to happen doesn’t mean it’s OK.
In policy terms, the nanoparticle issue “looks” quite similar to other policy issues like hazardous chemicals, where the challenge is how to find the appropriate balance of innovation and safety. These can act as policy models. I’d draw attention specifically to a new proposed law on hazardous chemicals in the European Union that seeks to place the onus much more on the manufacturer to provide evidence for (not proof because that’s impossible) the absence of hazard. The importance of this is that it shifts where the onus lies for producing evidence in the face of scientific uncertainty. It explicitly recognizes the Precautionary Principle — now a tenet of international law in, for example, the Biosafety Protocol and the Stockholm Treaty on Persistent Organic Pollutants.
It’s also worth noting that although not explicitly described as such, precautionary action was also taken on commercial whaling through the International Whaling Commission, and on ozone layer protection through the Montreal Protocol.
In summary, Greenpeace has some concerns about the nanomaterials being deployed that we believe need addressing — whether they actually will be remains to be seen. The bigger issue is how nanotechnology is going to be deployed, to what purposes and in whose interests. If nanotech is going to be as big as many think, then it’s a question that every person on Earth has a stake in.