Nanosilver experiment faces uncertain future

The mothballing of Experimental Lakes Area research this season has brought a sudden halt to a new research project that would have looked at environmental implications of adding silver nanoparticles to products such as clothes, furniture and even children’s toys.

Students involved in the silver nanoparticle research project collect lake samples in February. The team learned a month later they would not be allowed to continue research at the Experimental Lakes Area.

“There is no other place in the entire world where we can do this,” said Maggie Xenopoulos, an aquatic ecology professor at Trent University in Peterborough and one of the researchers involved with the study. Her research team received notice in late March that they would not be permitted onto the Experimental Lakes Area this season because federal funding for the site has run out and the future of the facility remains uncertain.

The project, funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, would have seen several kilograms of silver nanoparticles added to one of the lakes within the giant outdoor laboratory. Researchers would then have taken water, sediment and specimen samples to see where the particles were going, how they changed and what impact they had on the food web.

The nanoparticles, which are even smaller than viruses, are making appearances in a wide variety of industrial and consumer products because of their anti-microbial properties which help reduce bacterial growth and odours. But when these items are washed, nanoparticles end up in waste water discharge that eventually flows into lakes and rivers. It’s unclear how they infiltrate the waters and what affect this has on the environment.

“We’ve spent trillions of dollars in the development of nanotechnology and nanoparticles, but only a few million dollars to understand the toxicity,” Xenopoulos said.

Because silver nanoparticles are so small, they have a high surface area-to-volume ratio which makes them highly reactive and they have the potential to penetrate cells and damage DNA. But there aren’t any regulations in place to control their use because there’s no evidence that shows they are harmful to the environment.

Early laboratory research by Xenopoulos’ group indicates zooplankton may be sensitive to silver nanoparticles, but the implications of this won’t be clear unless the nanoparticles are added to an entire lake and studied — something that can only be done at the Experimental Lakes Area.

Students involved in the silver nanoparticle research project collect lake samples in February. The team learned a month later they would not be allowed to continue research at the Experimental Lakes Area.

“It is really difficult to see this at a small-lab, bench-top experiment level because you can’t put the whole food web in the lab,” Xenopoulos said. “The studies that we have produced so far are not going to tell us what’s going to happen at the lake level.”

The three-year project kicked off last year with researchers and students taking baseline measures of the lake. This year was supposed to be the first year of adding silver nanoparticles to the lake and measuring outcomes. Addition of the nanoparticles would have continued in 2014.

“A short-term effects study like this pays dividends in terms of making government agencies sit up and take notice and change their policies accordingly,” said Chris Metcalfe, professor of environmental and resource studies at Trent and one of the lead researchers on the project. He said Health Canada and Environment Canada are struggling with how to regulate new nanoparticles and that they are in dire need of data from research such as his silver nanoparticles project to help with risk assessment and policy making.

Now these agencies may never get that.

Metcalfe and Xenopoulos said they are talking with the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council about how to continue with an alternative project.