California is on the cusp of becoming the first state to adopt special regulations to protect workers exposed to silica dust in the artificial stone countertop industry.
A recent study and past state research reveals that many workers in the industry are coming down with irreversible lung disease from silica dust exposure because many manufacturers in California are out of compliance with related standards.
Experts: ‘Things are heading in the direction we feared’
State officials have identified 77 workers with silicosis contracted specifically from working with the artificial stone used to make “quartz” countertops. At least ten have died while others have needed lung transplants, according to NPR.
While natural stone contains silica, artificial or engineered stone contains more, so much more that public health experts have been warning about the risk.
“Things are heading in the direction that we feared. We’ve had more and more people presenting very severely,” Dr. Sheiphali Gandhi, a pulmonologist at the University of California, told NPR. “And they’re all very young.”
Dr. Gandhi and her colleagues recently published a new report describing dozens of silicosis cases in California’s countertop workers. Most of these cases involved Spanish-speaking Latino men who had emigrated from Mexico, El Salvador, or elsewhere in Central America. Their median age was 45.
State is fast-tracking an ETS
Cal/OSHA and federal OSHA both have regulations on silica exposure, but California found in 2019 and 2020 that in its countertop industry “72% of the 808 fabrication shops operating in the state were ‘likely out of compliance with the existing silica standard.'”
That led the state’s Occupational Safety & Health Standards Board to vote to fast-track new regulations to protect workers in the industry from exposure to materials with high silica content.
A Cal/OSHA spokesperson told NPR that the agency is holding an advisory committee in August 2023 and hopes to have emergency temporary standard (ETS) submitted to the board within three or four months.
No reason to believe this is confined to California
“This is something that we’ve had, if you will, flashing warning lights about for some time,” David Goldsmith, an occupational and environmental epidemiologist at George Washington University, told NPR.
Goldsmith and other experts say there’s no reason to believe this problem in the countertop industry is confined to California. The first U.S. case of silicosis in this industry was in Texas in 2014, with other cases occurring in Colorado, Florida and Washington.
The industry has “an estimated 100,000 people” working across the U.S. One study that did silicosis screening on the 43 employees of one engineered stone countertop facility found that 12% of its workers had contracted silicosis.
This issue could be far worse since workers who are undocumented or uninsured “may be reluctant to seek medical care … and doctors who aren’t expecting to see silicosis can misdiagnose it as pneumonia or tuberculosis.”
“I am certain that this is an underestimate of the severity of the problem in California,” Goldsmith told NPR. “And, by inference, it’s an underestimate of the severity of the problem in the whole United States.”
