Micro- and nanorobots are being designed to swim through the body delivering drugs, but no one has yet planned how to clean up the waste from making and using them. Most research on these microscopic robots focuses on how to build them, control them, and scale up production. The GREENS project addresses a gap that has been largely ignored: the environmental cost of their entire lifecycle, from fabrication to disposal. Without this, a promising medical technology could create a new pollution problem. The project will embed the 5R principles—Reduce, Recycle, Rethink, Repair, and Reuse—into every stage of designing, manufacturing, and deploying micro- and nanorobotic platforms. If successful, it could establish a sustainability framework that prevents these robots from becoming environmental contaminants after they have delivered their payload or been removed from the body. This matters for biomedical applications—where robots must eventually degrade or be retrieved—and for any large-scale environmental use, such as water treatment or pollution monitoring. The work aligns with the European Commission’s sustainable development goals and environmental action programme, aiming to ensure that a revolutionary technology does not leave a toxic footprint.
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Micro- and nanoscale robotic platforms have captured the attention of researchers due to their remarkable ability to perform tailored tasks with unparalleled precision and minimal invasiveness. These robots hold great promise, with the potential to revolutionize fields ranging from biomedicine to environmental applications. From catalytic to externally actuated robots (i.e., magnetic, light), these robots offer the possibility of targeted drug delivery and enhanced reactivity due to their autonomous motion. Moreover, the recent interest in the collective behavior of micro- and nanorobots as swarms has gone hand-in-hand with the implementation of degradable materials to ensure its later removal from the body. Currently, the main focus in the field relies on the design, fabrication, and implementation of such robots, with special emphasis on achieving proper delivery, manipulation and final automation of large quantities of them. In addition, it is also important to explore cost-efficient and mass-production fabrication techniques to ensure that micro- and nanorobots can be manufactured and deployed at scale. However, one aspect that has not received enough attention is the waste management cycle associated with the fabrication and use of these robots. In the GREENS project, we aim to implement for the first time the 5R (Reduce, Recycle, Rethink, Repair, and Reuse) principle from the manufacturing to the final implementation and removal of nano/micro robotic platforms, always accounting for the sustainability of the overall process to minimize the impact of fabricating/applying them to the environment. This initiative is aligned with the sustainable development goals established by the European Comission (EC), and is of great importance to the Environmental Action Program from the EC.
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