Assessment of airborne emissions during the use of a Cadmium Telluride Quantum Dots incorporating ink and a proposal to calculate their human health and freshwater effect factors

Quantum dots (QDs) confer a wide range of optical properties to pigments/inks. With new products and applications entering the market, the airborne emissions of QDs-incorporating inks during usage stage at consumer scale (e.g. household printing) and their corresponding impacts towards human health and the environment need to be investigated. In the present work Cadmium Telluride (CdTe) QDs have been selected as a case study. The targets of this study comprise: (i) the characterization under controlled conditions of the emissions during inkjet printing of a prototype of a CdTe QDs nanoadditivated ink and (ii) the assessment of the feasibility to derive human health and freshwater effect factors (EF) for potentially released CdTe QDs with the USEtox® consensus model. Mean particle size after 60 minutes inkjet printing corresponded to 59.52 nm. For human health EF calculation an extrapolation to the human EF of other nanomaterials has been proposed considering CdTe QDs’ specific surface area whereas for the calculation of the freshwater EF, few of the data available have revealed suitable. A generic constraint to calculate both EFs for CdTe QDs released throughout the life cycle of a product incorporating them is related to the absence of information corresponding to their specific (eco)toxicological impacts.