Challenges and current approaches toward environmental monitoring of nanomaterials

Engineered nanomaterials (ENMs), i.e., man-made particles having at least one dimension smaller than 100 nm, have found their way into the environment. Parallel to the efforts to elucidate the possible harmful effects of ENMs, techniques have been developed to monitor environmental ENM concentrations. This chapter discusses the techniques that can currently distinguish ENMs from naturally occurring particles at realistic concentration detection limits without a tedious sample pretreatment procedure. For inorganic ENMs, the most promising approach is based on single particle ICP-MS, and this technique has been developed in recent years to measure solid samples in addition to aquatic samples and distinguish the many different forms of occurrence of ENMs in realistic samples from naturally occurring particles. The detection capabilities for C-based particles are lagging and will likely be the focus of analytical developments in the coming years.