Every issue so far has been about a file — origin, duty, the coordinates of a forest. This one is about a lung, and it is the issue we were least comfortable writing, which is exactly why it belongs in the volume. Engineered quartz is one of Vietnam's genuine export strengths. It also carries an occupational-health shadow that a buyer who cares about more than landed cost has to look at directly.

The number that started the bans

Engineered stone is not mostly stone. It is typically 90 to 95% crystalline silica bound in resin. Intact, it is inert and handsome. Cut, ground or polished — especially dry — it releases silica dust fine enough to lodge permanently in the lungs of the people fabricating it. The result is silicosis, an irreversible and sometimes fatal disease, and it has arrived at a scale that regulators could not ignore: surveys found more than one in five Australian stonemasons — over 22% — diagnosed with it.

That evidence produced a response without precedent. Australia banned the manufacture, supply, processing and installation of engineered stone from mid-2024, and banned the importation of engineered-stone slabs, panels and benchtops from 1 January 2025 — the first national ban of its kind anywhere. California has moved toward the first US restriction. The health case, in other words, is no longer contested at the margins.

Where Vietnam sits in this

Vietnam's position in the quartz trade is a direct product of trade policy elsewhere. When US antidumping duties on Chinese quartz surfaces ran past 300%, production did not disappear — it relocated, substantially to India, Turkey and Vietnam. Those US orders on Chinese-origin quartz were continued into 2025, keeping the door open for Vietnamese material. The result is a top-tier Vietnamese export category built partly on being the compliant, lower-duty origin — the same logic Issue 1 traced across every group.

But on the silica question specifically, Vietnam currently has no ban and no export restriction. The material ships freely. That is not a hidden fact or an accusation; it is simply the state of play, and it means the occupational risk does not sit at Vietnam's border. It sits wherever the slab is fabricated — increasingly, in the buyer's own country, in the buyer's own supply chain, among the trades the buyer ultimately answers to.

A buyer's question, not a seller's opportunity

This is the part a sourcing desk is tempted to skip, so we won't. If you are specifying engineered quartz, the silica exposure is real and it is downstream of you — in the fabrication shop that cuts your slabs, not in the Vietnamese plant that pressed them. In a jurisdiction that has banned or restricted the material, the question may be settled for you. Where it hasn't, a responsible specification at least weighs the alternatives that exist:

  • lower-silica engineered bodies, now offered specifically in response to the health data; and
  • porcelain surfaces, which deliver much of the same performance without the crystalline-silica load.

None of that makes Vietnamese quartz a poor product — it is a strong one, and where it is legal and specified we will source it well. It means the category carries a question the others don't, and pretending otherwise would fail the reader. Our full data note on Vietnam's engineered-quartz capacity and exports has the market figures; this issue is the part of the story the figures leave out.

The next issue returns to firmer ground — a market softening, read from inside the factory cluster where it's happening: Why the Tiles Went Quiet.

Sources & data notes

Silica content (typically 90–95% crystalline silica), the silicosis prevalence among surveyed Australian stonemasons (over 22%), Australia's ban (manufacture/supply/installation from mid-2024; slab importation from 1 January 2025), the US antidumping duties on Chinese quartz exceeding 300% and their continuation into 2025, and Vietnam's current absence of a comparable restriction are drawn from occupational-health reporting, Australian regulator guidance, and US trade-remedy publications from 2024–2025. Occupational- health rules and product bans are changing quickly across jurisdictions; confirm the current law where your material will be fabricated and installed before specifying. This is orientation, not legal, medical or safety advice.

Specifying surfaces and want the silica question weighed honestly against porcelain and lower-silica options? Send us one BOM and we'll return the surface lines with alternatives costed, inside 48 hours. Our own fiber-cement line, DURAGREEN®, is sourced under the same principle: the right material for the spec, told straight.