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Sandpaper: An Unrecognized Hazard

How often have you used sandpaper?

If you do carpentry, you've probably used sandpaper to finish woodwork, to remove lacquer from furniture, or to resurface tables. If you do construction, you've likely used sandpaper to smooth walls and ceilings, or to finish windows. If you do body work, you've likely applied Bondo to fill voids and sanded it to smooth the surface before painting.

Did you ever think that you might be endangering your health by using this common and innocuous-looking material? You've probably never heard of anyone dying from using sandpaper, and it seems difficult to imagine how one could even get hurt from using sandpaper.

Despite its common usage and innocuous appearance, sandpaper can be deadly. Its hazard depends on the frequency of its use. (The dose makes the poison.) Workers who use sandpaper daily are at a substantial risk of serious disease and even death. How so?

When you use sandpaper, fine dusts are generated which you inhale from the air. The dust is comprised of particles that are too small to see. Particles so small are readily inhaled into the deepest recesses of the lungs, where they penetrate to the alveoli, the tiny air sacs where gas exchange occurs. Certain types of dust inflame the alveoli, resulting in a pneumonitis, which can progress to a chronic interstitial lung disease terminating in end-stage pulmonary fibrosis (scarring of the lungs).

Sandpaper used to be made from sand, which is silica. When inhaled, silica causes a deadly interstitial lung disease known as silicosis. Because of the hazards of inhaling crystalline silica, sandpaper manufacturers replaced the silica in sandpaper with aluminum. Unfortunately, aluminum can also cause interstitial lung disease, if it is inhaled in sufficient quantities over time.

Recently, a woman was referred to the Law Offices of Raphael Metzger for evaluation of a potential toxic injury case. The woman had worked for about 20 years in an abrasives plant, where she made sandpaper belts by using sandpaper blocks to sand the edges of the belts so they were rough and could be glued together to form a belt. The woman had interstitial infiltrates on chest x-ray and an open-lung biopsy confirmed the diagnosis of interstitial lung disease. But did dust from the sandpaper she used daily at work cause her disease? Or did she have idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis? A special study was done to her lung tissue using scanning electron microscopy to identify and quantify the types of inorganic particles in her lungs. This study revealed an extraordinary burden of aluminum in the lungs, which confirmed that the woman had an aluminum-induced interstitial lung disease caused by inhalation of fine respirable particles from the sandpaper she used daily at work.

The hazard of aluminum-induced interstitial lung disease is not new. The first cases of this disease were published in the 1940s. The disease is now well known, and is described in textbooks.

Despite the known hazards presented by chronic use of sandpaper, manufacturers of abrasive products have refused to acknowledge that their products can be deadly, and routinely conceal the hazard from workers. Sandpaper manufacturers could easily warn users of the hazard simply by printing a warning on the cloth side of sandpaper where they print their logos. It's time they did so

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