Chapter 18 - Safety and ethics of carbon nanomaterial-based sensors

Abstract

The rampant human activity since the onset of modern civilization wreaked havoc on the environment. Organic and inorganic environmental pollutants pass through the food chain and ultimately make their way into the human body causing various types of diseases. A slew of sensor technology was developed to detect and analyze the myriad types of environmental contaminants. Significant research attention these days is focused on developing such sensors with high sensitivity and selectivity when scientists came up with some emerging materials—carbon nanomaterials. The scope of these materials such as graphene, carbon nanotubes, carbon dots, fullerenes, etc., is enormous and inevitably, they have gained immense popularity lately. They have unique physicochemical properties, exciting electronic and surface properties which render them fantastic electrode modifiers for electrochemical sensing of heavy metal ion-based environmental contaminants. They are found to be promising materials in other sensor techniques such as fluorescence sensing. So far so good, but there is a dark side of carbon nanomaterials. The exuberance over their exciting properties often overlooks the lurking dangers associated with their use in modern technology. Turns out, carbon nanomaterials have some adverse health effects on people exposed to them. Proper risk assessment of these materials is paramount so that they do not become a trouble to the society. In this chapter, we would like to summarize the possible health hazards of the uncontrolled use of carbon nanomaterials in modern technology. Whereas the rest of the book is relevant to the bright sides of carbon nanomaterial-based technology, this chapter explores their dark sides and would remind the scientific community about the possible repercussion of their rampant use. We end the chapter with a silver lining—the biodegradation of these biopersistent nanomaterials—and the necessity of research in this area.