The manufacture of stone products presents unique and serious safety risks to workers. From slabs falling and crushing workers to airborne dust, working with stone requires a commitment to health and safety from the business owners and all workers in the production facility.
Stone Safety
Silica dust is generated in workplace processes such as crushing, cutting, drilling, grinding, sanding, sawing, or polishing of natural stone or man-made silica containing products. Every stone product can include a small amount of silica and should be treated with care. Silica dust can be generated and found during manufacturing and construction, and when mining or tunnelling.
We should know later this year whether or not engineered stone will be banned and what licensing arrangements will be put in place if a decision is made to allow material with a silica content of 40% or less to be used. If a total ban is imposed by the unions as promised, then the very serious issue of silicosis will largely go away.
Another safety issue found when people work with stone is falling slabs. People have been killed and crushed by heavy slabs, either falling from a store, or when being transported and craned to and from stone processing machinery. Flying debris from modern machinery is not a big issue but if stone is cut with manual machinery like saws, it can be.
Other more general safety issues include manual tasks with heavy loads or repetitive movements; machinery or equipment with moving parts; and hot or cold temperature extremes. General safety risks can be controlled by eliminating a dangerous process; substituting a dangerous process for a safer one; engineering controls like isolating workers from dangerous machinery movements; administrative controls like training and changing the way people work, and as a last resort, personal protective equipment.
