GREEN NANOTECHNOLOGY - ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT

            Nanotechnology has recently been identified with principles of sustainability and with a ‘green’ agenda generally. Some maintain that this green dream of nanotechnology is a rather ephemeral societal phenomenon that owes its existence to the campaign ploys of politics and business. Taking seriously the concept of ‘green nano’, this examines the common ground between sustainability discourse and the discourse of nanotechnology. Green nanotechnology is understood as a boundary concept in which disparate discourses and concepts join together. The primary concern of the paper is to show that nano discourse and eco discourse share visions of control and of excess. Both ecotechnology and nanotechnology accept and incorporate arguments about limited growth, and each develops strategies of control be it through a new-found precision in the control of material flows or through greater efficiency in product design. Keywords anotechnology, Ecotechnology, Sustainability Visions. Responsibility development ‘Green nanotechnology’ portrays itself as a technology that is at once environmentally friendly and innovative. It turns nanotechnology’s general promise of controlling matter and shaping the world ‘atom by atom’ into a green promise.

            We thus enter a green nanoworld in which production processes are optimized and, indeed, waste-free production per se becomes a possibility. Harmful substances that find their way into the environment can be pinpointed and removed without a trace. The global carbon footprint can be reduced and renewable energies used even more efficiently. ‘There is nothing implausible about such ideas’, comments a journalist from the New York Times in his article ‘Aiding the Environment, a Nanostep at a Time’. He goes on to say: ‘It is easy to see how the ability to manipulate matter at the scale of a few nanometers […] could lead to environmental breakthroughs’ [9]. Green nanotechnology presents the prospect of fulfilling a ‘twofold dream’2: products can be constructed from scratch in accordance with sustainability principles, and older products that are at least potentially harmful to the environment can be replaced by ‘greener’ ones. green nanotechnology is understood as a boundary concept upon which disparate discourses and concepts are able to join together.

            As a boundary concept ‘green nanotechnology’ draws together the deep conceptual structure as well as its superficial exhibition. It establishes relations between technophobic and technophile ideologies, between the excessive character of innovation and the controlling one of limits to growth.

            These various relations do not need to be exposed as antitheses because they all refer to or appropriate the boundary concept.