While “cite?” is a pretty good response, it is the responsibility of the manufacturer to establish product safety & toxicity.
Seller, take care.
While a little emotional, a good question.
I cannot find any studies on the environmental impact of nanotube disposal. Until this week, I doubt anyone was thinking much about it as we were unable to produce enough for it to be a problem.
Despite being carbon, it is not realistic to expect an easy recycling/disposal solution. My WAG is it will be a problem on the same scale as plastics.
The potential benefits should out weigh the new source of landfill waste. In most cases the new material will replace a plastic and hopefully not contribute more waste but just a new type.
Your final statement, which I bolded, is the only one I don’t understand. If someone can use nanotubes to make an unbreakable razor that never dulls and can be prices at lets say $90. Is this a bad thing?
Or: We’ve got the cost down so low that potatoe chips are now coming in nanotubes bags and the darn things never decay. In this case back to my WAG on plastics.
If this is what they’re claiming it is, it’s the biggest advance in materials science since knapped flint. Knapped flint gave humans mastery over the planet; practical production of nanofiber would give us mastery over the solar system.
But I’m not getting too hyped just yet. It seems incredibly more likely to me that the claims we’re seeing here are significantly exaggerated somewhere between the researchers and us. I suspect that what they actually have is something one might call nanofiber felt, rather than something more cable-like. Which is still a very significant development, mind you, just not all that.
I’ve heard two things on a health basis:
- they’re a bitch if inhaled.
- current ‘wads’ of nanotubes combust if expaised to a a flash of light.
cite: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/26/1213220
If it’s made of carbon, it will burn. Disposal will not be a problem.
Gee, Slashdot, known for their scientific accuracy. 
Do Diamonds Burn at a reasonable energy cost?
If they pan out like I think they will as elements in solar panels…yeah. For that matter they can be burned in a solar-powered furnace. The bitch is going to be in the collection and disposal of nanotube material. You can’t just toss it into a landfill. Or maybe you can. I don’t think anybody has done any studies on how fast they break down due to environmental conditions. For all we know, rats might be able to eat them. But furnaces exist today that can torch diamonds easily, and they are reasonably common.
Okay, but as you said, too soon to worry about the waste. Lets just keep ramping up the material production.
There may be some great recycling possibilities anyway.
If it’s much stronger than the material its replacing, then it should be a net benefit, environmentally, at least in terms of bulk. Whether it has some toxic property or other issue, I don’t know. But a car body made out of 300lbs of nanofiber is infinitely preferable to one made out of 1200 lbs of steel. Not only because it will take up less landfill space, but because it will probably be much more energy efficient to make, and a car that’s 900 lbs lighter will burn much less gas.
But as I said before, there may be many other issues that make this stuff less than universally useful. Look at composites. On paper, they have all kinds of advantages over steel structures, but you don’t see a lot of composite airplanes. They don’t handle lightning strikes well, for one thing. For another, the material tends to degrade under medium heat - which is why almost all composite airplanes are painted white or a very light color. A composite shell for a car might be lighter than steel, but steel crumples in an accident and absorbs energy. Composites fracture.
So we’ll have to wait and see, but from what I’ve seen so far this looks like a big step forward.
from here
AIUI, that 50% includes the entire fuselage.
Well, I meant composite aircraft as in the Beech Starship. Granted, the dividing line is starting to get smaller as more and more components are built from composite materials.
A little bit more info from Best Syndication
…snip…
I don’t really like this approach. I’d love to believe that nanotubes are the next great thing, but I’d also love to believe that some research was done ahead of time to figure out what they’ll do to the environment. History is full of wonder materials that turn into environmental disasters. Asbestos, for example – they used to love it so much they put it into every building material imaginable. Then… oops!
That said, we’d be crazy if we didn’t explore the benefits of nanotubes. Go knows we need all the help we can get.
I was replying to silenus but I will clarify.
Now that we can finally start producing these in reasonable quantities, this would be a good time to start studying the side effects and recycling/waste disposal methods. However, we should pursue mass production at the same time.
I’m not too worried about disposal: we’ve been generating C[sub]60[/sub] and C[sub]70[/sub] for millenia - it’s produced by burning candles - with no known ill effects.
This might just have those Middle Eastern oil ticks soiling their burkhas in fear.
Who has the patent and are they publicly traded?
Yes, but there’s a big difference between small-scale and large-scale production.
Also, burning hundreds of candles per year (or perhaps per month) is one thing (pre-Industrial Revolution), but burning the equivalent of thousands per day caused a great deal of problems (post-Industrial Revolution).
This is great. Solar power, transistors, armor, the benefits are endless if this is affordable and mass produced. They didn’t say how much a square yard would cost to produce and what that compares to other fabrics.
However a part of me worries about the grad students & undergrad students who helped in this creation and if they will make any money off of this. That would suck if they just got a plaque for all their work on this subject.
Boy, I hope your right. Hopefully the Students get something big out of this but the Patents will not be theirs. The research was a project sponsored by US & Australia if I read it correctly.
The patents have not yet been sold or licensed to any corp so far from what I can see, but I too can’t wait to find out. They are probably still pending anyway.
I know I will be following this as closely as possible for the next year or more. This could be the advent of a whole new age.
I am especially hopeful of the Flexible Solar Panel and LCD panels that can possibly be built with this tech.
I wonder if this particular production technique will yield the forms of Nanotubes useful for Medicine.