Abstract
Prolonged inhalation of crystalline silica particles has long been known to cause lung inflammation and development of the granulomatous and a fibrogenic lung disease known as silicosis. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classified Respirable Crystalline Silica (RCS) in the form of quartz and cristobalite from occupational sources as carcinogenic for humans (category 1). In this regard, numerous studies suggest that the toxicity of quartz is conditioned by the surface chemistry of the quartz particles and by the density and abundance of silanol groups. Blocking these groups to avoid their interaction with cellular membranes would theoretically be possible in order to reduce or even to eliminate the toxic effect. In this regard, the main contribution of the presented research is the development of detoxifying processes based on coating technologies at industrial scale, since the previous studies reported on literature were carried out at lab scale. The results obtained in two European projects showed that the wet method to obtain quartz surface coatings (SILICOAT project) allows a good efficiency in inhibiting the silica toxicity, and the preliminary results obtained in an ongoing project (SILIFE) suggest that the developed dry method to coat quartz surface is also very promising. The development of both coating technologies (wet and a dry) should allow these coating technologies to be applied to a high variety of industrial activities in which quartz is processed. For this reason, a lot of end-users of quartz powders will be potentially benefited from a reduced risk associated to the exposure to RCS.
Highlights
Total European usage of crystalline silica is measured in thousands of millions of tonnes per annum
It is long established that prolonged inhalation of crystalline silica particles causes lung inflammation and development of the granulomatous and fibrogenic lung disease known as silicosis
In these tests Al2O3 was used as particulate negative (PNC) and DQ12 as quartz positive control, this quartz is widely used in the literature as positive control, the results may be compared with other studies on Respirable Crystalline Silica (RCS) toxicity
Summary
Total European usage of crystalline silica (i.e. quartz and cristobalite) is measured in thousands of millions of tonnes per annum. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified Respirable Crystalline Silica (RCS) in the form of quartz and cristobalite from occupational sources as carcinogenic for humans (category 1, [14]) In this regard, numerous studies suggest that the toxicity of quartz is conditioned by the surface chemistry of the quartz particles and, in particular, by the density and abundance of silanol groups [15]. Numerous studies suggest that the toxicity of quartz is conditioned by the surface chemistry of the quartz particles and, in particular, by the density and abundance of silanol groups [15] Blocking these groups to avoid the interaction with cellular membranes would theoretically be possible in order to reduce or even to eliminate the toxic effect. This postulate has been repeatedly verified by various researchers [15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23] who managed to reduce its toxicity at lab scale, on treating quartz with different substances: polyvinylpyridine-N-oxide (PVPNO) [15], organosilanes [16,17], aluminium lactate [18,19,20,21,22] and strong Lewis acids, such as AlCl3 or FeCl3 [23]
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