Australia's Science Forum

At the end of last year I heard the Catholic sector was spraying all the boxes with a dilute solution of PVA glue and disposing of the most likely rock samples. Not sure if it caught on!

What ended up happening with these rock sample kits? I have no idea how old ours are. I am currently sorting and relocating them (and by "I", I mean mostly the teacher who has a background in geology!) so it's a good time to make sure we don't have things we shouldn't...

Ah, did you miss out there! At the time this was going around, I worked in a different school system. They had tested a number of kits at a sample school and determined that all kits containing the baddies were to be destroyed. We had to fork out the cost of a guy coming out in almost hazmat gear to collect the offending kits and wipe down all the surfaces where the kits were stored. We also had to pay the cost of having someone monitor the air quality for the whole time that guy worked. Cost us about $3000 plus the cost of replacing all the kits.
I never could find out the source of the original alert notice. There was no government department reference on this document. I was always suspicious of this so called "official" document. I would be interested to know if anyone found where it came from.
I don't think anything happened here in 2016 so I've just left things as is. Honestly, I hadn't thought about it until now!

I was here for the start of it (2011 - I'm RosalieM on page 1) but not the 2015/2016 discussion. I've printed out the document linked from November 2015 which looks kind of official and put it with the rocks to deal with later!

RosalieL wrote: ↑24 Mar 2023, 14:05 I was here for the start of it (2011 - I'm RosalieM on page 1) but not the 2015/2016 discussion. I've printed out the document linked from November 2015 which looks kind of official and put it with the rocks to deal with later!

Yeah, if it is the one I saw, it looks "kind of" official. Certainly in the deal with later category - not for a Friday afternoon!

Mine were removed, after I made the "asbestos police" check a sample for serpentine that contains asbestos, it turns out it was the dodgy sort. The whole box x 8 were taken. All the other samples in the beautiful wooden boxes were deemed to have possible contamination. Mind you they were bagged up and left in my lab for years, until someone remembered.