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Research in environmental risk assessment (ERA) of nanomaterials (NMs) has been an important incentive to develop analytical approaches to better understand and quantify fate and ecotoxicity of these materials in standard media and field environmental samples. This chapter presents and overview of the most recent insights in fate and ecotoxicity of NMs to steer analytical chemists to the most pressing analytical needs to further ERA of NMs thus avoid making it overly conservative. Sensitive analysis is required to quantify and characterize NMs at generally low expected concentrations (μg L− 1 to ng L− 1 range). Moreover, analysis of the core NM composition is required because many NMs are subject to transformation reactions in the environment, which in turn affects their fate and ecotoxicity. At the very minimum, dissolution of the NMs should be quantified, especially during standard ecotoxicity assays, while mesocosm-scale experiments have revealed unexpected NM behaviour that otherwise does not appear from standard tests. Finally, databases of relevant fate descriptors need development to aid NM fate prediction, similarly to soluble contaminants.

Engineered nanomaterials (ENMs), i.e., man-made particles having at least one dimension smaller than 100 nm, have found their way into the environment. Parallel to the efforts to elucidate the possible harmful effects of ENMs, techniques have been developed to monitor environmental ENM concentrations. This chapter discusses the techniques that can currently distinguish ENMs from naturally occurring particles at realistic concentration detection limits without a tedious sample pretreatment procedure. For inorganic ENMs, the most promising approach is based on single particle ICP-MS, and this technique has been developed in recent years to measure solid samples in addition to aquatic samples and distinguish the many different forms of occurrence of ENMs in realistic samples from naturally occurring particles. The detection capabilities for C-based particles are lagging and will likely be the focus of analytical developments in the coming years.