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Nanomaterials are likely to kill people in the future just as asbestos did unless extensive safety checks are put in place, a Royal Commission report has said.

The team of experts assessing the likely impacts of the emerging technology are worried that when nanomaterials escape into the environment they will damage people and wildlife but that it will be years before the effects are seen.

Past generations have brought into general usage materials such as asbestos, leaded petrol, CFCs and cigarettes without adequately considering the potential damage and the commission fears nanomaterials will prove similarly dangerous.

Only by introducing rigorous safety systems, including widespread monitoring and intensive research, can threats posed by nanomaterials be identified and countered, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution concluded.

Nanomaterials are already used in a variety of products on the market including a range of clothes in Japan that have dispensed with dye because refracting nanomaterials provide the colours.

A nanomaterial placed on the surface of the glass in the roof at St Pancras Station has been designed to keep it clean. It reacts with sunlight to break down dirt without the need for window cleaners to clamber up on the roof.

Many sun creams contain titanium dioxide particles, a nanomaterial which has been in use for years. There are about 600 different products using nanomaterials around the world and around 1,500 have been patented.

Professor Sir John Lawton, chairman of the commission, accepted that no evidence has yet been found to show damage has been caused to human health or the environment by nanomaterials.

But he said that while the technology had the potential to offer many benefits to society there is also the possibility it will cause harm.

“The rate of innovation in this sector far outstrips our capacity to respond to the risks,” he said. “There is an urgent need for more research and testing of nanomaterials.”

So little is understood about nanomaterials in the environment that scientists have yet even to work out ways of finding them.

Nanomaterials manufactured for use in products were considered by the Commission to be those that measure one to 100 nanometres long. A grain of sand is about a million nanometres wide.

Professor Susan Owens, of the University of Cambridge, said: “If we don’t do anything and we leave it, then things manifest themselves in 10 to 15 years’ time. By then the technology is so embedded in society it’s very difficult to deal with it.”

Backing calls for research and monitoring she said that problems caused by CFCs, asbestos and other products, were only detected when they started damaging human health and the environment.

Experts on the Commission estimated Britain and the rest of the world has about a decade to carry out research on the safety of nanotechnology before the use of nanomaterials, ranging from the diameter of a DNA strand to that of a virus, become too widely-used for any damage to be halted.

The commission’s report, Novel Materials in the Environment: the case of nanotechnology, rejected an outright ban on the technology because of the huge potential benefits.

A spokesman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said: “As the Commission states, it has found no evidence of harm to health or the environment from nanomaterials, but the Government remains committed to researching their health and environmental impact.

“In particular, ministers are pushing in Europe to ensure that effective regulation is in place. EU and UK reviews of existing legislation have concluded that the existing regulatory framework can be changed to extend to nanomaterials.”

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