"Objective: While industrial sectors involving semiconductors, memory and storage technologies, display, optical and photonic technologies, energy, biomedical, and health sectors produce the most nanomaterial-containing products, nanotechnology is also used as an environmental technology to protect the environment through pollution prevention, treatment, and cleanup. This paper focuses on environmental cleanup and provides readers with a background and overview of current practice, research findings, societal issues, potential environment, health, and safety implications, and future directions for nanoremediation. We do not present an exhaustive review of chemistry/engineering methods of the technology but rather an introduction and summary of the application of nanotechnology in remediation. Nanoscale zero valent iron is discussed in more detail.
Data Sources: We searched Web of Science for research studies and accessed recent U.S. EPA and other publicly available reports that addressed the applications and implications associated with nanoremediation techniques. We also conducted personal interviews with practitioners about specific site remediations.
Data Synthesis: Information from 45 sites, a representative portion of the total projects underway, was aggregated to show nanomaterials used, type of pollutants cleaned up, and organization responsible for the site.
Conclusions Nanoremediation has the potential not only to reduce the overall costs of cleaning up large scale contaminated sites, but it also can reduce cleanup time, eliminate the need for treatment and disposal of contaminated soil, reduce some contaminant concentrations to near zero-all in situ. Proper evaluation of nanoremediation, particularly full-scale ecosystem wide studies, needs to be conducted to prevent any potential adverse environmental impacts."

Support: Digital