'Safe' alternatives to engineered stone bench tops may not be so safe: study | Hacker News Reader

'Safe' alternatives to engineered stone bench tops may not be so safe: study

abc.net.au

29 pointsadrian_mrd63 comments

It seems quite reasonable to assume that the way to go is preventing people from breathing in ground-up countertops instead of trying to make countertops that would magically be healthy to inhale.

I would expect that a shop that specializes in cutting countertops would have equipment to cut them with essentially no dust exposure. Water jets come to mind (and people even sell waterjet tools specifically designed for cutting countertops), but a CNC mill with good dust collection ought to be able to do the job pretty well, too.

So why is there so much dust exposure to begin with? Here's an article showing someone attacking a countertop with an angle grinder without dust collection at all:

https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2023/07/425871/deadly-dust-enginee...

Even a basic dust collector attached to that angle grinder (these are cheap!) should make a pretty big difference.

This makes too much sense. Especially using water spray to collect most of the dust at the moment its created and before it diffuses into the air, and perhaps ambient mist to collect some of any remainder.

Have you ever watched an average landscaper break or cut concrete? It’s an unbelievable mess.

I have hundreds of hours on a Stihl TS-420 cutting concrete and plastic pipe for a water and sewer company.

The saw even comes with an attachment for a waterline, but the company never provided a water source.

And it wasn't because it was a small company or that they had money issues, they just didn't give a shit.

Some days the foreman wouldn't even provide us potable drinking water.

I can't even express the feeling of dejected irony in realizing that a company that that installs water infrastructure can't provide drinking water to the people doing the installation.

Is there any trade where people actually use appropriate safety precautions? Our culture seems to be actively anti safety.

It's horrible. Any attempt to protect yourself is met with shame, even if it's something as simple as not wanting to eat a sugary snack someone offers, or wearing earplugs in a dangerously loud bar, or wanting to go get a hand truck instead of lifting a piece of furniture.

No one can force you to feel shame about those things. That's entirely on you.

That's not how human social interaction works though. Monkey see, monkey do. Some more than others. It is a psychological condition if you truly are immune to peer pressure.

Fortunately we can go beyond monkey.

But not that much, and not everyone the same amount.

With training, yes, but not everyone is lucky enough to learn before they have a permanent injury or an addiction, or they are broke and homelessness and have a criminal record.

Some of these dangers we actively encourage, like high school sports, where 17yos will list off their fairly major injuries, this is considered normal, and the only realistic way to prevent those injuries would be to quit, because playing in a way that avoids injury is not what's expected.

> It is a psychological condition if you truly are immune to peer pressure.

By that criteria, I must be a psychopath. Integrity is not a psychological condition. Lack of it is.

Yours is the logic that leads to people "just following orders." Nazi see, Nazi do!

In this case, it's not a culture of avoiding PPE. That's propaganda from shitty contracting firms trying to save a few bucks by not providing PPE in the first place. The illegal laborers they hire to do the work aren't ever in a position to complain.

Nazi Germany did happen, didnt it?

You are making it into a value judgement. That can only cloud observation of our species.

A better question would be: how are individuals reinforced in overcoming our limitations?

I think you may be missing the point, which is that it's strange that so many people make fun of careful safety.

It's not a stretch to go from making fun of someone for using workplace safety equipment to making fun of them for wearing a seatbelt. If I had to work with these people I'd ridicule them right back and take no shit.

And yes, of course it's strange. There are a lot of things other things that are extremely strange about our society: for example, the expectation that everyone drive an individual car to be able to get anywhere, the ubiquitous use of non-biodegradable plastic packaging, the idea that housing is a commodity whose investment returns take precedence over the basic human need for shelter.

If you go against these things you will look strange in comparison to others, but it is nonetheless the right thing to do.

Peer pressure exists to be ignored. If you give in you've lost so just don't give in.

The purpose of Capitalism is to extract as much profit as possible. If we attended to "worker safety" (and extend it from "putting railings around the meat grinders" to "setting office hours that don't slowly give seated workers metabolic disorders"), Capital extraction would halt! Think of the shareholders!

In your kneejerk attempt to sneak in a zinger about how bad capitalism is, you failed to realize in examples given, mitigation tools are either provided by the employer (eg. hand truck ) and/or costs a trivial amount (eg. earplugs, which cost like 10 cents each).

> Is there any trade where people actually use appropriate safety precautions?

Have you actually worked in construction or the trades? When I look at the construction/trade workers around me in Canada, the US, and the EU, hardhats, safety glasses, safety shoes, and (where applicable) fall arrest harnesses are all commonly used and used correctly. I've also done construction and trade/engineering-related work myself 10+ years ago, and using all the relevant safety equipment was mandatory and nearly 100% enforced. It didn't take much effort from management to get to close to 100% usage either, as people I worked with generally accepted that the safety measures were worthwhile.

Re: the specific issue mentioned in this article, I've been around a bunch of pottery studios in the past, and every single one of them strictly enforced measures to avoid silicosis. (namely, almost all operations were done with dustless wet clay, and at the end of the day all traces of clay were cleaned up before they could dry, essentially every single time)

Residential or commercial?

I've worked around the trades(Stuff like setting up control systems on a construction site, and doing light woodworking to fix all the stuff I had to break just to flash some firmware on some badly designed inaccessible device).

The real pros use safety equipment, and it's great, I actually enjoy working with them more than other coders, but some of the craigslist handymen seem to think a crack pipe is respiratory protection.... and there's tons of them even in places I'd expect to be all really good pros....

This seems like… a no duh? Sure I admire finding alternatives that are less bad for you… but when you grind almost anything into a fine dust and aerosolize it, breathing it is really bad. Proper PPE is essential for almost any industry like this.

Somewhat related: There's a dish detergent brand in the US that has a spray version. Not a pump handle squirt-squirt-squirt type, instead it aerosolizes the detergent.

My wife likes it. I'm less enthused, because it definitely feels like I'm breathing part of it in when it's used near me.

Haven't we learned yet that making airborne particles of something is usually a bad idea if people are around?

How do you even use an aerosolized detergent? Just reach into the dishwasher, spray, and quickly close the door?

I assume it's for the obnoxious activity of hand washing that some of us have to deal with

Hand washing is, bad?

In the US, most non-studio apartments have dishwashers.

When I moved here from the UK, where dishwashers are more of a luxury item, I was confused by just how much some people loathed hand-washing dishes.

Oh, I thought they were complaining about washing your hands.

Oh, that makes more sense. Terminology mistake on my part, the word "detergent" to me only refers to the soaps used in machines.

Although, on reflection, it still doesn't make a whole lot of sense in that context...

Unfortunately, that's not generally known at all. Most people I speak to are very surprised when they learn that burning candles is pretty much the same as second hand smoking.

Interesting, can you share any further reading? A quick Google turns up surprisingly little evidence-based guidance. For what it's worth, I found this Cleveland Clinic general-audience (non-peer-reviewed) article that concludes "the science isn’t strong enough to suggest we should stop buying and burning candles": https://health.clevelandclinic.org/are-candles-bad-for-you

Intuitively, adding any amount of combustion product to the air is bad, but the above article suggests that burning an occasional candle is inconsequential compared to, say, cooking indoors.

My phrasing was perhaps too strong. I learned this from here https://dynomight.net/air/ This is a great read. Here is a previous HN discussion on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26964722 There are some disagreements but I find the argument that air quality is greatly underappreciated as a health risk convincing. And that candles cause bad air quality.

The article talks a lot about healthspan which I think is a great measure and idea. Your referenced article talks about at-risk people and that they should avoid candles. It also states that candles should be burned in well ventilated spaces, which I believe most people don't do as they don't consider it.

A healthy persons healthspan is negatively affected by candles and such. They just have more health to spare.

The article talks about cooking as well and they are likely talking about cooking with gas which is very unhealthy. It should be illegal to sell indoor gas stoves for cooking in my opinion.

I'm not sure if the point here is to suggest that marble/granite solid slabs are better, personally perhaps due to rockclimbing experience it pisses me off that there is no pushback on people buying slices off a mountain to put in their kitchen, when there are reasonable alternatives, even very nice ones.

The article says that natural stone is worse:

The study revealed that cutting natural products like granite was also not safe.

"What we found ... was that the natural products we had in the panel of products that we assessed actually caused the biggest inflammatory response," Professor Zosky said.

There is this thing called 'Granito/Terazzo' here, it was pretty popular pre-war and well into the 60's when more modern materials took over. And definitely not a rich people thing, you'd see this stuff everywhere. Hallway floors, showers, bathroom floors, bench tops etc. Polishing and cutting that stuff is pretty messy but you can wear proper protection and then it is manageable if you don't do it every day. Any kind of long term exposure to airborne solids is detrimental.

Safer alternatives to engineered stone countertops could include wooden butcher block, tile, stainless steel, etc.

Stainless steel has its own safety issues (hexavalent chromium exposure from welding or grinding)

Surely there's more industry knowledge and better tooling/PPE behind stainless steel given the widespread adoption in all kinds of industry? I'd assume the risk for the workers installing it in homes is far lower as the top + sink is usually delivered in a single piece and only needs to be mounted on its support while with engineered stone often the slab is cut to size and reshaped on site

This article isn't really talking about the tiny amounts of on site cuts (which are typically done outside on site anyway).

Other articles have shown the shops where this product is cut in mass without any PPE. The shops are a hazard to anyone that gets close as there appears to be about zero dust control.

But even this is a tempest in a teacup compared to the amount of concrete cutting occurring without PPE. I don't see concrete being replaced on job sites, so I do wonder what the motivation behind many of these articles are? It's like some industry group that sells a competing product wants more exposure to their product without actually making the workplace safer for the people working with it.

The motivation is the large number of workers contracting silicosis

Wood shop dust isn't so great, either. But most (?) professional wood shops ought to have dust collection equipment.

Yup - standard vacuum attachments for sanders, at the very least.

Indeed. Wood dust is a known carcinogen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IARC_group_1_Carcinogens#Compl...

Along with keeping the blade cool, a wet saw handles most of the dust problem too.

It improves things, but wet saws still throw an absolute pile of slurry into the air. Sure, it's weighed down with water, but it's still not great for you.

So you want to replace stone with some shitty plastic aggregate or some other godawful synthetic material instead of just wearing breathing protection for the couple of hours you’re cutting it? That makes no sense.

Because this article is about pulling heartstrings, not rationality. Stone countertops = rich people, rich people = bad, and rich people should feel guilty about doing said bad thing and spend massive amounts of money on plastic product instead.

If you instead just switch the headline out to concrete it wouldn't generate clicks because everyone has concrete. Also the safety protocols in homebuilding around cutting concrete are just as bad as stone cutting.

If you are cutting anything with a spinning blade you should be wearing PPE. Metal, rocks, plastic, wood, etc. That's where we should demand both laws and enforced requirements for these workers so we're not exploiting and cripping an entire class of people.

The risk of using this bench top is minimal. The risk is for the workers making them (or demolishing).

The fix is to never saw this material. Always cut it with a water cutter. Problem solved.*

Am I the only one that gets really weird vibes from this website and the news it posts? Feels like the UK's Sun, but not as bad.

This is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's website (the Australian national broadcaster a la the BBC). As a whole coverage is pretty good, but the website has gotten more clickbaity in recent years.

All right. The clickbait is pretty prevalent

It is literally the most trusted news source in Australia...

https://tvtonight.com.au/2020/06/abc-sbs-lead-most-trusted-n...

Perhaps. A quick browse across the front page was filled with articles trying to provoke negative or outraged emotions, much like bad clickbait does. I generally associate this with lower quality reporting.

But rich people need engineered stone bench tops. Surely there's a way to get tradespeople to keep making them?

Down with the rich and all, yes I agree, but don't most people, regardless of their economic status, need some type of bench top (or countertop, as us Yanks call them)? Seems like this is saying that there's no good stone or "stone" alternative.

Mine is ceramic tile. Its probably 100 years old.

Cutting ceramic tile produces a fuckton of fine dust. Including silicates.

Not an issue with proper ppe. Same with these countertops honestly. You read the underlying studies and its like everyone with the health issues did not wear any ppe. The people who did wear ppe didn’t have the health issues.

They're pretty much in every recently renovated housing unit... not just rich people houses.

Not to mention that engineered stone is actually cheaper than the alternative (ie. granite) options.

CNC comes to mind. Or, if they have to be cut by hand, better equipment (saws with dust collection) and/or breathing masks?

But I don't have to guess, Wikipedia knows it best: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicosis#Prevention

These sets of articles are popular because the strike out at the wealthier with stone countertops, so they tend to gain traction because it highlights an exploited proletariat

These articles wouldn't get the traction if it was instead "There is no safe alternative to concrete". Then people start thinking, well, I have concrete in my house and I don't want to get rid of that.

PPE usage in the construction industry is especially lax. Looking to replace the product with some other material with its own set of tradeoffs isn't needed here. Making the industry conform with the law and expected safety equipment is.

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