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Water-fed Equipment Does Not Make Artificial Stone Fabrication Safe.

A common theme from the artificial stone slab manufacturers is that if the fabrication shops would just use wet equipment there would be no silica safety hazard for fabrication workers. However, yet another study, this one from Australia shows that the industry’s recommendations to use water suppression methods to reduce concentrations of silica dust don’t work – they do not reduce silica concentrations below regulatory exposure levels. In their January 22, 2024 safety journal article Respirable silica dust exposure of migrant workers informing regulatory intervention in engineered stone fabrication published in Safety and Health at Work, Dr. Seneviratne, et al. found that when water-fed equipment alone was used to fabricate artificial stone, 71% of workers still had daily time-weighted average silica exposures above the permissible exposure level (PEL). Of course, the slab manufacturers have already known this for decades, which is why in their slab factories they use both water-fed equipment and full air-fed “moon” suits. The impracticality and expense of always using water-fed equipment and full air-fed suits in fabrication shops is what led Australia to recently ban artificial stone entirely. When is the artificial stone slab industry going to stop lying to the fabrication shop owners workers?