China disqualifies steel-testing lab after NZ warning

This Chinese regulators have disqualified a steel-testing laboratory for using false accreditation after being alerted by New Zealand investigators.

That comes as the Commerce Commission in New Zealand continues looking into a complaint that Fletcher Building sold substandard rectangular hollow steel (RHS) beams, a very common structural product. The China National Accreditation Service (CNAS) said the lab at Dalian Steelforce HiTech had falsely used the accreditation of another lab to do tests it was not allowed to do.

It is not clear if these tests related to RHS steel.

Fletcher subsidiary Easysteel and Steel & Tube have both issued Dalian’s certificates to customers who bought RHS steel in New Zealand.

Fletcher said it was confident the steel met local standards and Steel & Tube made no comment.

Australian Fletcher subsidiary Steelforce, which owns Dalian Steelforce Hi-Tech, said all its products sold in New Zealand were tested at CNAS-accredited laboratories “without exception”, and complied with local standards.

Steelforce chief executive Rod Corkill did not say how long the lab had been using the accreditation found to be false.

A customer who bought RHS from Steel & Tube had it tested last month and the results differed markedly from what the Dalian Steelforce lab issued.

Dalian approved the steel sample’s strength in mechanical tests, while the New Zealand lab failed the RHS for two out of three strength measures.

Standard benchmarks are a tensile strength of 500 and a yield strength of 450 but the lab rated the steel at 476 and 424 respectively. That compared to Chinese-lab test scores of 540 and 510.

A separate lab in China did the chemical testing. Those results, and the comparable New Zealand ones, were all above standard but were also markedly different.

In five cases, the local tests showed twice as much presence of chemical elements such as boron, which makes steel harder to weld, compared to the tests in China. The first involved Easysteel-supplied RHS and also had different results from the China ones. Fletcher Easysteel general manager Hamish McBeath said Steelforce was a “large, reputable Australian supplier that has supplied RHS steel to the New Zealand and Australian market for many years”.