The 11th Meeting of the OECD Working Party on Manufactured Nanomaterials (WPMN) was held in Paris, France from 18 to 21 February 2013. It included participants from government, the Business and Industry Advisory Committee, Environmental NGOs, the International Organisation for Standardisation, the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR).
The meeting was an opportunity to advise delegations of the various regulatory and technical developments under way in Australian departments/agencies and to be appraised of international developments that enable us to benchmark our work against comparable overseas agencies and to learn from their experiences. The meeting also discussed progress on the OECD Sponsorship Program for the Safety Testing of a Representative Set of Manufactured Nanomaterials and agreed next steps to enable the initial (exploratory) phase of this program to be completed by June 2013. An Australian Consortium led by the CSIRO is participating in the Sponsorship Program.
The WPMN is progressing projects on risk assessment of nanomaterials, voluntary and regulatory programs exposure assessment and exposure mitigation and health and environmental testing of manufactured nanomaterials.
The outcomes from all WPMN activities are published on the OECD public website (http://www.oecd.org/env/ehs/nanosafety/publicationsintheseriesonthesafetyofmanufacturednanomaterials.htm)
