Coloured sand products which have been contaminated with asbestos and used widely in Australian schools were not required to undergo any testing for the hazardous material before they were imported, border officials have confirmed.
The Australian Border Force (ABF) on Tuesday said it would now consider sand products designed for children’s sensory play to be high risk, meaning they will require proof they are asbestos-free before they are allowed into the country.
Several ranges of children’s sand products sold at major retailers including Officeworks, Target and Kmart have been recalled in the past week after testing of samples found they contained asbestos.
Because these products had previously been deemed low risk, their suppliers would not have been obliged to test them at any point in the supply chain, the ABF confirmed.
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This means they were not required to be tested for asbestos before being exported to Australia and they would have not undergone any testing onshore before they were distributed.
Asbestos, a hazardous material that can cause terminal diseases if its crystalline fibres are breathed in, has been banned in Australia since 2003 and can not be imported except in very limited circumstances.
Goods considered high risk of containing asbestos must be tested by an accredited laboratory in their country of origin or in Australia, and a test certificate supplied to border officials.
But the ABF considers mandatory testing of lower-risk goods to be inefficient and costly to industry.
The contamination scare caused more than 70 public schools in the ACT to close on Monday for cleaning.
New South Wales and Victorian schools remained open, although schools with the sand wrote to parents confirming they had been using the products.
The ACT government said dozens of schools would reopen on Tuesday with another 16 “partially open”. About 25 were going to remain closed.
Nine Catholic schools in Tasmania were closed or partially closed and several schools in New Zealand were also closed.
The general secretary of the Independent Education Union’s Victoria Tasmania branch, David Brear, said it was working with employers across non-government schools “in order to ensure that appropriate risk-mitigation measures are in place”.
The Australian Education Union, which represents public school teachers, declined to comment.
The ACCC on Sunday said respirable, or airborne, asbestos had not been detected in any of the tested samples meaning the products are unlikely to release asbestos fibres fine enough to be inhaled, even if they are contaminated.
Prof Fraser Brims, a consultant respiratory physician at Sir Charles Gairdner hospital and director at Curtin University Medical School, said the ACCC was correct in saying the risk to children was low.
“Any exposure to asbestos and all of its forms is definitely undesirable, but there is a really important message that the risk of developing asbestos-related diseases is dose-related, and so [with] very low exposures, which is what no doubt is the case with this sand, the risk is unmeasurably low,” Brims said.
Brims said the states’ decisions whether or not to close schools came down to “their own interpretations of safety and risk”.
