The project EnvNano - Environmental Effects and Risk Evaluation of Engineered Nanoparticles aims at studying the particle specific properties that govern the ecotoxicological effects of engineered nanoparticles and in this way lay the foundation for a potential shift in the paradigm of environmental risk assessment of nanomaterials.
Many research projects have been funded in the emerging field of nano-ecotoxicology and environmental risk assessment of nanomaterials. However, an analysis of these shows that they inherently assume that the methodologies developed for chemicals can be adapted to be applicable for nanomaterials. A prerequisite for the applicability of many of these methodologies are that the chemicals are soluble in water implying that the environmental fate and behaviour can be predicted from the partition coefficients.