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Comment by yeeeloit | Hacker News Reader

Exactly, silica is not the problem. Silica is everywhere, we don't wear PPE to drive down a dirt road.

It's the silica plus the adhesive additives combined in your lungs that does the damage.

> Exactly, silica is not the problem

It is. The air-driven rock drills were called "widowmakers" by miners because of silicosis that quickly reaped its operators.

> Silica is everywhere, we don't wear PPE to drive down a dirt road.

Silica down the road is not in the form of fine dust.

Maybe. Or it's the dose, which sounds quite high when working with engineered stone.

Or the size of the particles. Cutting engineered stone has been shown to generate large quantities of extremely fine particles (< 1 µm). Cutting natural stone or driving on a dirt road, the typical particle sizes are much larger.

Why isn’t it being cut wet? Surely if dust is the problem, water is the solution.

If done properly, probably.

> In February 2021, a WorkSafe Inspector attended the workplace and observed an employee using a powered abrasive polishing tool to abrasively polish a slab of white coloured stone which was from the brand Stone Ambassador. The tool was being used without the required control measures in place. Instead, the employee was applying water to the stone from a bottle with a small hole in the lid when the tool was in use.

Yes, it is. There's an ABC article about this, they interviewed one particular business owner who has gone to great lengths to get good equipment which cuts engineered stone with wet saws which don't generate dust, and has worked hard to instill a culture of safety with his workers. Nobody working there has silicosis.

As per the rest of the comments here, it just seems that most tradies would rather literally die than implement any reasonable safety precaution.

It's the bozos working with the stuff without proper PPE.

I watched a grave marker carver absolutely bathing in dust with just a thin bandanna, I was in there for 5 minutes and was left choking in their hazardous work environment.

WitH sufficient PPE and dust control, it's not a problem. This is just barking up the wrong tree because they can't get workers to not be idiots, so they pick a scapegoat to ban at random. It's not fucking asbestos. It's apparent but ineffective motion by expediency.

I don't think seeing one person do something can really compare to having a dedicated taskforce do 2 years of research into an industry, in terms of understanding risk and what practical options there are to manage said risk.

> they can't get workers to not be idiots

Is it that or is it that someone doesn't want to pay for those industrial-scale air cleaners?

I got a little interested in particulate air quality during covid so I ran across the entrepreneurs selling them. You can probably make the air in a quarry as clean as in a surgery room, if you're willing to pay.

There is an easy, cheap and well-tested air cleaner: wet cutting, i.e. cutting under running water. All dust will be bound in the runoff, almost no airborne particles. But it is messy (often not doable indoors, because you splatter everything with rock slurry) and just a little more expensive gear than for dry cutting. So nobody does it...

Water is increasingly becoming something we can't waste as easily as before in many parts of the world.

it is a closed loop

From the report:

> A total of 12 successful prosecutions have been reported since 2021, with many related to the uncontrolled processing (dry cutting) of engineered stone materials

https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/sites/default/files/202...

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