Chinese construction material failure, part 2?

Everyone remembers how residential drywall from China, turned out to be a really bad deal.  Now, it appears there's issues over glazing coming from China.  In an article from the Architect's Newspaper, experts are pointing to glass manufactured in China as the primary cause in a series of tempered glass failures in buildings.

Project developers and design teams have not released the sources of the failed glass, but glass fabrication experts speculated that all of the buildings used tempered balcony glass from Chinese manufacturers as a cost-cutting measure. This glass is more likely to contain nickel sulfide inclusions, impurities that can cause breakage unless heat soaking detects imperfections, which have largely been removed from domestic glass manufacturers’ products.

The solution has been to switch to laminated glazing, which, in most cases makes more sense than tempered glazing, anyway -- if it breaks, the laminated layer will keep the glass shards in place.  But as always, building owners balk at the higher cost of laminated layers.

What owners sometimes forget however, is that a laminated layer acts as a theft-deterrent, as you cannot simply break the glazing to get inside.  If you manage to break the outer glazing layer, you now have to risk getting cut while trying to tear through the laminated layer, and break the second glazing layer.  Have you seen Urban Outfitters stores?  Some have broken glass windows -- the glazing held in place by laminated layers.



Anyway, with or without lamination, you'd have to accept the impurities causing the glazing to crack, if you allow a subcontractor to use glass from China.  Just one more black mark for the Made in China label.