Yesterday’s announcement that engineered stone would be banned from crossing Aussie borders is a step in the right direction for tradie safety, but more still needs to be done.
In the wake of a successful campaign that saw the deadly stone top banned from being manufactured or used on worksites in July this year, the federal government has now added an extra layer of defence barring benchtops from entering Aussie borders.
Starting January 1st 2025, any form of engineered stone, be it benchtops, slabs or panels, will be banned from entering the country, putting an end to the largest pipeline of engineered stone still available today.
Undoubtedly coming as welcome news for tradies still grappling with stringent silica safety changes regulations, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations Murray Watt said no Australian deserves to “have their health compromised due to their working environment”.
“Evidence strongly suggests exposure to respirable crystalline silica when working with engineered stone can lead to silicosis and other serious lung diseases,” he said.
“These illnesses have been devastating and debilitating for Australian workers and their families, and we cannot continue to allow it to happen.”
Not out of the woods yet
But, while a step in the right direction, Glyn Pierce-Jones, CEO of workplace safety technology company Trolex, warned that there is still a long road ahead when it comes to keeping tradies safe on the tools.
With all recent bans and safety measures now in place across the industry, Pierce-Jones said that the tradies were running the risk of being lulled into a false sense of security while the danger of silicosis still loomed large.
“Even with engineered stone out of the picture and strong workplace safety regulations – as strong as any in the world – Australian worksites still carry risks that can only be reduced if real-time dust monitoring is introduced,” he said.
He pointed to a recent study exploring silica levels on construction sites in the US, which have the same dust control measures as Australia, where researchers found common construction activities like using the walk-behind saw, dowel drilling and grinding all produced dangerous airborne dust levels far above the industry guidelines.
“The results indicate that exposure to hazardous levels of RCS (Respirable crystalline silica) can still occur with the OSHA-mandated controls fully implemented and that exposure to RCS may have been exacerbated from background silica concentrations,” the authors concluded.
And those findings are assuming construction sites are correctly implementing dust safety measures, which if a 2023 study by Monash University School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine is to be believed, a lot of tradies aren’t.
According to the study co-author, Emeritus Professor Malcolm Sim, “poor dust control measures have been widely reported in the industry”.
Pierce-Jones said these findings should be a “wakeup call” for Australia to adopt real-time air monitoring as part of their safety guidelines to identify employees who are at an increased risk of silica exposure.
“Why should we conclude that those dust control measures have improved, especially now that engineered stone is banned?” he said.
