The shiny kitchen benchtops killing young Australians

The dust from cutting engineered stone benchtops and vanities is killing Australian tradies.See all 9 stories.

Perched on the end of his chair and struggling to breathe, 56-year-old Dinh Tran uses all his strength to point to the table to his left.

“They are my friends,” he says, referring to the bottles of pills waiting in line to relieve him of some of his pain and anxiety. The other hand pats an oxygen tank. “I see them every day. They’re all my friends,” he smiles wryly.

Tran is dying of silicosis, an incurable, preventable, work-related lung disease which was caused in his case by inhaling tiny particles of crystalline silica dust released every time he cut, ground and shaped engineered stone such as Caesarstone into kitchen benchtops and bathroom vanities.

In August last year, doctors told him he had eight months to live. It was never his plan to end his days like this; his world reduced to a few rooms in his home, tethered to an oxygen tank and unable to find the words to tell his children their father is dying.

When he left Vietnam and signed up for work at Exquisite Marble & Granite in Sydney’s western suburbs, he had no idea it would kill him.

Tran is not alone. The courts are filling up with silicosis-stricken workers, with more than 70 in Victoria and Queensland. Many are stonemasons, suing their employers for failing to provide a safe work environment. The manufacturers of the deadly product are also in their sights, including Caesarstone, which pioneered the engineered stone slabs used for kitchen benchtops in Israel in 1987.

The shiny kitchen benchtops that have become a feature of many Australian homes are being likened to the asbestos of the 21st century. Engineered stone poses no risk to householders if left in place. To be safe in the workplace, it must be cut wet and stonemasons must wear full protective gear.

But that is not how Tran nor so many others worked.

They didn’t understand that the engineered stone contained up to 95 per cent crystalline silica, the dust from which is toxic. In contrast, marble contains 2 per cent and granite contains between 10 and 50 per cent silica.

Documents, photographs and damning video footage obtained as part of a joint investigation by The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and 60 Minutes have uncovered a dark underbelly of workplace health and safety, where workers are left unprotected by a system that allows companies to put profit before workers’ health and light touch regulators failing to do their job despite evidence of breaches of the law. When they do take action, it is too little, too late.

The investigation went to Israel, the home of Caesarstone, which started the global craze in artificial benchtops, and the place where the alleged cover-up began.

It found that it isn’t just stonemasons exposed to high levels of crystalline silica which, if inhaled in large quantities, puts them at risk of getting silicosis or autoimmune diseases, lung cancer, kidney disease and pulmonary infections.

A study into silicosis by Curtin University estimates there are more than 275,000 workers, including miners, contractors, construction workers, stone masons and tunnellers exposed to high levels of crystalline silica which is carcinogenic.

Commissioned by the ACTU, the study predicts up to 103,000 workers will be diagnosed with silicosis.

Silicosis is the oldest occupational lung disease in the world. Instead of the number of sufferers falling, it has risen over the past 20 years. This coincides with a government-led infrastructure boom which includes a record number of multibillion-dollar road and tunnel projects across NSW, Victoria and Queensland – many of these projects bore into sandstone, which has high levels of silica. It also coincides with the introduction of Caesarstone, and later other competitors, into the Australian market.

In a statement, Caesarstone says: “Caesarstone’s efforts to improve industry safety are ongoing and have increased over the years.”

‘You take it home with you. It’s everywhere’

In November 2019, father of two Ken Parker was diagnosed with silicosis and given a life expectancy of five to 10 years.

Ken Parker, 47, has his lung capacity measured after contracting silicosis.Credit: Steven Siewert

He had spent 18 years working at a factory in Sydney’s west in conditions that were hot and dusty, cutting, grinding and polishing artificial stone.

Parker is adamant he was never told about the dangers of the product with which he worked. Before he quit, he was cutting 40 benchtops a day.

“I used to tell people it was like working in hell,” the 47-year-old says. “You can’t see more than a couple of feet in front of you for the dust. It’s in your clothes, in your skin, in your eyes, car, you take it home with you. It’s just everywhere.”

Parker says until 2018, when the first silicosis patient in Australia spoke up, the industry had told workers that engineered stone was safer than natural stone.

“The focus was on making money. Workers are easily replaced. ‘Just hurry up, boys, get it done’,” he says.

Parker’s lung capacity is now at 40 per cent. He finds it hard to walk and talk at the same time. “Loss of job, loss of house, loss of lifestyle … you wake up in the morning, and you dunno what you’re supposed to do.”

X-rays show the effects of silicosis on victims’ lungs.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

He says he hopes to see his daughter turn 18.

Parker says some of his colleagues at the factory have also been diagnosed with silicosis.

Parker’s legal case was run by law firm Slater & Gordon in the Dust Diseases Tribunal. A confidential settlement was reached last year. The factory was contacted for comment but did not respond.

A death sentence at 31

Thirty-one-year-old Josh Hunt, who started as an apprentice stonemason when he was 15 and has worked at factories in Queensland, Melbourne and Sydney, says the dust was so bad he’d blow stone out of his nose all weekend. Three years after leaving, he can still taste the dust.

Josh Hunt (inset) and with his young family on the beach.Credit: 60 Minutes

In November 2018, Hunt was diagnosed with silicosis and given a life expectancy of 10 years.

“It’s taken its toll. It’s taken everything from me,” he says. “I’ve got three daughters and seeing, you know, walking them down the aisle, or worry about seeing them on their high school graduation in their dress. I don’t like to talk about it too much because it does make me quite upset.”

Hunt went to Maurice Blackburn and is taking legal action against his factory and manufacturers including Caesarstone Australia and Cosentino Australia. The Queensland factory was contacted for comment but did not respond.

‘Like being strangled’

Professor Deborah Yates has to tell patients they have an incurable disease.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

Professor Deborah Yates, a respiratory physician of 30 years, describes silicosis as an insidious disease. “It’s like being strangled ... like having your lungs contracting from inside,” she said. “It’s a sort of hidden scourge. You really need to get checked up with a chest CT because the other types of investigations are relatively insensitive, so they only pick up late disease.”

Yates thinks Caesarstone played a critical role in the current surge in silicosis patients given its dominance in the Australian market. She believes the warnings about the dangers of cutting engineered stone should have been better managed.

Caesarstone’s headquarters and main factory are in Caesarea, a coastal haven for the rich and powerful, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and billionaire James Packer.

According to locals, Caesarstone is powerful and relies on heavy-handed tactics including hiring top gun lawyers to silence its critics.

The bullying was ramped up in 2012, the year it was listed on the US Nasdaq stock exchange and made its owners rich.

Professor Mordechai Kramer, director at one of the world’s most prestigious transplant centres, the Institute of Pulmonary and Allergy Medicine at Bellison Hospital in Israel, published a research study with colleagues that officially linked an outbreak in silicosis among stonemasons in Israel to the opening of the Caesarstone factory in 1987. The paper, titled Caesarstone: Silicosis disease resurgence among artificial stone workers, was quickly renamed.

“The editor of the journal was afraid that something will happen, so he called me and said, ‘I changed the name of the paper to artificial stone, not Caesarstone’. I tried to fight with him, but I could not. They hire the best lawyers in the country,” Kramer says.

“They also sent me warnings, ‘if you continue to mention Caesarstone, we’ll take you to court’.”

He says at the time Caesarstone was the dominant player in the Israeli market and all his patients were linked to the product.

The company says in its statement: “The objection to the article was on the basis that it targeted Caesarstone.”

Kramer says: “They never admit that the silica is the cause of the disease. And they make some minimal compensation settlement out of court to shut the workers down. But I see the patients. They are all over the country. Hundreds of patients.”

A patient with silicosis receives treatment at Rabin Medical Centre, Israel.Credit: Amit Elkayam

Kramer’s study of Caesarstone and silicosis covers 1997 to 2010, with the earliest lung transplant in 1997, a decade after it first opened its doors in Israel.

“We didn’t have any silicosis cases in Israel ... But since 2006 we started to see rolling in one patient after another, and very severe cases that needed lung transplants, and then we found that all of them were working with the new stone, Caesarstone, that was made in Israel.”

It was only after a TV documentary aired in Israel in 2010 that Caesarstone started putting warning stickers on the blocks of stone.

Warnings came too late

Fifty-eight-year-old Israeli stonemason Doran Yehel, who had a lung transplant two years ago, says the warning stickers came too late.

“When I started, Caesarstone sales agents came out to sell the product and would say that it was 95 per cent natural, so for a long time, I thought it was safe.”

Warning stickers were first placed on engineered stone in 2010 (left); then upgraded in 2018.

Another worker, 65-year-old Avraham Nir, underwent a lung transplant after being diagnosed with silicosis. He says when Caesarstone started putting warning stickers on the slab, they put them on the bottom, “so nobody could see it”. Nir ran his own business and said the only engineered stone he worked with was Caesarstone. “They said it was natural. They didn’t say it was dangerous,” he says. “They knew, they had to know.”

Nir says as more workers started to get sick and take legal action, Caesarstone started to drip-feed information. “Don’t shake your clothing, use water when cutting, wear a mask,” he says. “It’s all too late.”

By 2018, around the time Australian stonemasons started to get sick, it re-designed the stickers, including increasing the size of the words, using hazardous warning signs and changing the wording to make it clearer that the dust is dangerous.

Caesarstone says from the 1990s it included warnings about the risks of silicosis in its safety data sheets, followed by warning labels on the slabs in 2010 and in 2020 released a “comprehensive master of stone” learning platform online. Each course takes five minutes.

“Engineered stone is entirely safe to consumers in its installed form and silica only presents a risk to workers if stone is handled incorrectly,” Caesarstone says in its statement. “The biggest problem historically has been fabricators’ compliance with regulations and enforcement of those regulations. That’s the role of employers and work safety regulators.”

The early warnings

Yigal Rozman, another Israeli stonemason, hasn’t worked since 1997 after developing silicosis during the five years he worked with the product. Every year since then his condition has deteriorated. Now the most basic tasks are nearly impossible. “Even brushing my teeth is very difficult,” he says.

He has spent the past decade trying to warn governments and medical practitioners about artificial stone. In June 2014, he wrote to the Abbott government alerting them to the dangers of Caesarstone and other artificial stone.

The letter, sent to him on behalf of the then minister for employment Eric Abetz, said a workplace exposure standard for respirable crystalline silica has been in place for more than 30 years and the government was “committed to protecting the health and safety of workers in Australia and recognises the harm that substances in the workplace can cause to workers, their families and the broader community.”

Rozman says he was upset by the reply. “They totally disregarded it,” he says. “If they took it seriously, they could’ve saved lives.”

In Australia, it was only after media interest in 2018 and reports of the death of a 36-year-old Queensland stonemason in 2019 that the federal government acted.

Within weeks of the worker’s death, the government launched a national dust disease taskforce to develop an approach to the control and management of dust diseases including silicosis.

The Caesarstone factory in Sdot Yam, Israel.Credit: Amit Elkayam

Almost four years on – and nine years after Rozman’s warning to the government – there still isn’t a national register and air monitoring in workplaces that use engineered stone is still not required.

There is, however, a code of practice, a reduction in the workplace exposure standard for the amount of crystalline silica in the air, and the dry cutting of engineered stone has been banned in most states.

Victoria introduced a compliance code in 2020. It also required engineered stone companies to be licensed, which puts specific requirements on them to keep workers safe.

But Kate Cole, the immediate past president of the Australian Institute of Occupational Hygienists (AIOH), said there are large inconsistencies in the regulation of silica which continues to put workers at risk of silicosis.

The taskforce’s June 2021 report says reform is urgently required. “There is evidence to suggest that nearly one in four engineered stone workers who have been in the industry since before 2018 are suffering from silicosis or silica dusted related diseases,” it says.

It said if there were no improvement in regulatory compliance rates by 2024 then a process should be put in place to ban some or all imported engineered stone products.

A mass of notices and complaints lodged with SafeWork NSW in the past two years suggests little or no improvement in compliance.

There are issues all over Australia with factories and sites breaching the regulations.

Cole says a study published last year by the AIOH revealed there is still not enough awareness and understanding by engineered stone employers on the risks posed by this toxic dust.

“The industry is plagued by poor safety standards, and there is limited, if any, evidence to demonstrate that this is an issue that is under control. All we have is evidence to say that this is a continued problem,” she says.

This masthead obtained videos of factories across Queensland and Western Australia with damning vision of unsafe workplaces. One factory has a thick layer of silica dust on work surfaces, tools and a water bubbler. Another, taken last month on a work site, captured two workers dry cutting a slab of engineered stone.

‘It’s too late for them’

Spiro Tzouganatos, a Sydney barrister at Maurice Byers Chambers, says in his practice’s silica cases have risen 400 per cent in the past four years. He has represented more than 200 workers with silicosis. “By the time I get involved in their case, it’s too late for them,” he says.

Barrister Spiro Tzouganatos specialises in defending workers with dust diseases including silicosis. Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

“Australians are very enamoured of their engineered stone tops and bench tops, and we are paying the price for that,” he says. “If you look at the number of silicosis cases there’s almost a perfect correlation: the higher the sales, the higher the amount of silicosis.”

He says when the world realised asbestos was dangerous, it was banned. Caesarstone says: “Silicosis is nothing like asbestos”.

In Australia, the number of workers who have silicosis is unknown due to a lack of comprehensive screening. The number of those who have died is also unknown due to a lack of a national register.

In the past three years more than 70 silicosis cases have been filed in Victoria and Queensland. Cases are also being filed in NSW and other states.

Caesarstone’s latest annual report shows in December 2021 it was involved in 38 lawsuits relating to silicosis claims in Australia.

In September 2020, Caesarstone’s Australian product liability insurer ceased coverage of newly diagnosed silicosis-related claims. Caesarstone Australia now pays its legal settlements from its revenue.

“Insurance coverage is not a measure of industry safety,” Caesarstone says.

A trove of documents shows how SafeWork NSW failed to rein in stonemason Dinh Tran’s employer Exquisite Marble & Granite despite multiple breaches from 2018.

The owner of Exquisite says he closed the business last November after being diagnosed with silicosis. He says when he opened the business he didn’t understand the dangers of working with engineered stone. He used a variety of artificial stone products, but Caesarstone was the most popular. “They never explained the risks,” he says. “Prior to 2018 we cut dry because nobody told us it was dangerous ... I never saw the stickers.” He says he feels very bad for Tran.

The role of SafeWork

In October 2018, SafeWork NSW issued Exquisite Marble & Granite multiple improvement notices – given to companies to allow them to continue operating while they address the contraventions within a timeframe.

The notices are issued for: silica dust found on toilets, in the lunchroom, on benches in the office, poor compliance, workers not wearing proper protective equipment, lack of training, no health monitoring, and exposing workers to “significant levels” of crystalline silica above the Australian Workplace Exposure Standard “which may pose a risk to their health if not adequately controlled”.

Dinh Tran’s silica dust-covered workplaceCredit: Safework

Instead of shutting it down, even temporarily, to fix the safety breaches, SafeWork gave the company an extension after it requested more time “because this is our busiest time”.

Two years later, another factory inspection found silica dust produced from dry cutting covering the factory kitchen and toilets, as well as workers not wearing protective equipment. The company was fined $3600.

In 2022, four years after its first visit, and after Tran was diagnosed with silicosis, SafeWork conducted an inspection and found further breaches that result in three improvement notices.

The company Ken Parker worked at also has a history of SafeWork interactions.

In March 2019, SafeWork inspected the factory and issued it with five improvement notices for breaches including workers not wearing proper protective equipment and poor ventilation. It told the company its workers need to be booked in for a lung screening.

It took the company almost five months to book an appointment for its workers, including Parker, who received his diagnosis in November 2019.

In March 2021, almost a year and a half after Parker’s diagnosis, a SafeWork inspector took photos of the factory. The inspector noted unventilated walls and roof, except for three wall fans, and dust-contaminated residue on the floor.

SafeWork NSW says silica compliance has been a priority since 2017.

“SafeWork NSW inspectors have completed more than 2100 silica-focused visits to workplaces across engineered stone, construction, tunnelling, and other industries,” it says in a statement. “These visits resulted in more than 1300 notices issued. Around 900 of those notices were silica-related.”

Parker’s former employer is facing criminal proceedings in the District Court of NSW for its alleged breach of duty of care to workers. The company has not responded to this masthead’s questions.

Sophie Cotsis, the NSW opposition work health and safety spokeswoman who led the charge for an inquiry into SafeWork NSW late last year, says the handling of Exquisite and other factories is a disgrace.

“The regulator goes in and does nothing. This has to change, this culture has to change,” she says. “They are risking thousands of people’s lives by not taking immediate action.”

Cotsis says her key concerns are a lack of enforcement, lack of inspections and lack of follow-up.

“It’s a hear no evil, see no evil regulator,” she says. “If they’re not inspecting, they’re not finding places that are doing dry cutting.”

This investigation of thousands of pages of internal SafeWork NSW documents revealed the regulator received dozens of tip-offs and complaints in the past two years about silica dust.

Instead of visiting sites for an inspection, on dozens of occasions it sent a letter to the company saying: “an inspector will not be attending the workplace ... at this stage.”

WorkSafe Victoria has initiated prosecutions against a handful of manufacturers. A Dandenong stonemasonry company was fined $25,000 in June last year, and a Montrose quarry operator was charged with six contraventions of health and safety laws over staff silica exposure. In January this year, the regulator took legal action against 13 separate engineered stone manufacturers.

Where to from here?

There are growing calls to ban engineered stone.

“It’s the only way,” says Ken Parker. “Without it, there’s always going to be a loophole and there’s always going to be a way around it and the companies will always find it.”

The NSW Minister for Customer Service, Victor Dominello, agreed a lot more needs to be done. “As it stands, an importation ban can only be implemented by the federal government,” he said. But added the national discussion on whether or not there should be a ban should be brought forward from 2024.

He said Work Health and Safety laws are framed nationally and NSW is a signatory to that inter-governmental agreement. “But my strong position is there should be a national registration scheme. If at the WHS ministers’ meeting on February 28 there is no consensus to move forward to a national registration scheme then I will be asking my agency to look at going alone.” (Victoria isn’t part of the harmonised WHS laws model and introduced a licensing scheme in November 2021.)

Unions are joining forces to lobby the federal government to ban engineered stone by July 2024. The CFMEU said if the government does not act, it will ban its members from working with it.

Manufacturers such as Caesarstone don’t agree. It said, “banning engineered stone will not resolve the issue of silicosis in Australia”. It said almost all substitute materials contain some level of silica.

For Caesarstone, the key to improving safety is the implementation of a national mandatory licensing scheme, “modelled on the Victorian regime introduced in 2022”. The scheme entails “a rigorous auditing and enforcement structure”.

But things are starting to change. Almost two weeks ago, in Madrid, Caesarstone competitor Cosentino, which sells an artificial stone product known as Silestone, was found guilty in a Spanish Court of negligence. Reuters reported that the company’s owner accepted a six-month suspended prison sentence after admitting to covering up the dangers of the product.

Professor Kramer, who has been treating patients with silicosis in Israel for decades, says Australia and governments around the world need to ban it.

Professor Mordechai Kramer, director of the Institute of Pulmonary and Allergy Medicine at Bellison Hospital in Israel, one of the world’s most prestigious transplant centres.Credit: Amit Elkayam

“They should ban it completely because we cannot prevent disease from this stone,” he warns. “It’s like asbestos … the silica is toxic. It’s a major health hazard and there’s no way to make some compromise… If it will not be banned, there will be a major epidemic all over the world.”