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EPA Starts Regulating Nano-tech

The WaPo [1] says that the EPA is going to start regulating Nano-products sold as Germ Killing agents.

The Environmental Protection Agency has decided to regulate a large class of consumer items made with microscopic “nanoparticles” of silver, part of a new but increasingly widespread technology that may pose unanticipated environmental risks, a government official said yesterday.

The decision — which will affect the marketing of high-tech odor-destroying shoe liners, food-storage containers, air fresheners, washing machines and a wide range of other products that contain tiny bacteria-killing particles of silver — marks a significant reversal in federal policy. It also creates an unexpected regulatory hurdle for the burgeoning field of nanotechnology, which involves the creation of materials just a few ten-thousandths the diameter of a human hair.

Under the new determination, first reported on Tuesday by the Daily Environment Report, a Washington publication, and confirmed yesterday by the EPA, any company wishing to sell a product that it claims will kill germs by the release of nanotech silver or related technology will first have to provide scientific evidence that the product does not pose an environmental risk.

Call this what you will, I’ll likely agree with you.  But I find it strange that they should wait until such time as a democrat victory occurs before the bureaucrats start in with their major power grab.  Clearly, this idea was sitting in somebody’s drawer, waiting for a moment of leased opposition to the government power grab.  Apparently the recent election provided that. 

Go ahead and tell me how this most recent election only affects what happens in Congress, per se’.

BBCT: The Inactivist [2]