The researchers will present their work today at the
"In just the past decade, engineered nanomaterials have been incorporated into so many consumer products," says Yuqiang Bi, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Paul Westerhoff, Ph.D. "The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has funded us to assess these nanomaterials. They want to know how to predict and manage the risk from these substances." Westerhoff adds, "This case study is one of several that consider the use, fate, transformations, release and potential human or ecological exposure to nanomaterials across the life cycle of nano-enabled consumer products."
As a first step, the team needed to find the quantum dots. "Consumer electronics don't list their ingredients like foods do," says Bi, who is at Arizona State University. "We have to scavenge everything we can find to get ideas about how the electronics are manufactured and which consumer products actually have the nanomaterials." The researchers scanned product information, on the internet and in stores, looking for tablets and televisions that boasted quantum dot technology. They took a few candidates back to the lab, where they disassembled the screens and looked for quantum dots.
Using mass spectrometry and X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, the researchers identified a tablet containing cadmium quantum dots (namely cadmium selenide, or CdSe), a heavy metal that is toxic and carcinogenic, and a television with indium (namely indium phosphide, or InP) quantum dots. While indium is less toxic than cadmium, the indium nanomaterials require more energy to produce, so the question becomes whether the potential gain in safety is worth the expense of energy. "Just because a product has quantum dots doesn't mean it poses a risk," Bi says. "That depends on whether the quantum dots can get into the environment."
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-08-tvs-tablets-green-screens.html#jCp
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