Dear Colleagues,

The concept of Safety by Design (SbD) was established to help the development of nanoparticles and materials with risk minimisation at every stage of the design process to achieve long term commercial potential and consumer confidence. Similarly, concepts around green nanomaterials and Benign by design (BbD) reflect the need the need to reduce reliance on critical non-renewable resources and to move away from the single-use culture towards a more circular economy. Together these concepts will help nanosafety and Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) consideration to keep up with innovation, and indeed merge into so-called “safe innovation”.

At the heart of SbD/BbD lies the concept of substituting the question “Is it safe/sustainable?” with “Can we engineer it to be safe/sustainable?” This Special Issue of Nanomaterials will attempt to cover the recent advances in the design of safe (lower hazard, exposure or persistence) and/or benign (green, recyclable, re-usable, lower impacts across the whole life cycle) nanomaterials, focussing on those molecular and physico-chemical properties (intrinsic and extrinsic to the material) driving hazard or exposure (and thus risk) and on strategies to design-out, replace, substitute or mitigate the undesirable effects whilst retaining functionality and cost-efficiency.

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Nanomaterials is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• nanomaterials    
• nanocomposites  
• nano-hybrids    
• nanosafety    
• hazard assessment    
• risk assessment    
• classification    
• grouping    
• safe-by-design    
• benign-by-design    
• predictive toxicology