Achi news desk-
School in Saint-Jerome, Co. Had to throw away thousands of fake solar eclipse glasses purchased on Amazon.
The Riviere-du-Nord school service center confirmed that the 3,700 glasses that Ecole Polyvalente Sainte-Jerome had to throw away after students and teachers noticed that some of the glasses were not as opaque as others.
“Not all of them were fake,” said the service center’s communications officer, Nadyne Brochy. “In the batch that was received, when the school started distributing them to the students, the teachers noticed that some of the glasses did not have the same level of opacity. When there was doubt, they did research and found the supplier’s message explaining that his product was fake.”
Brucchi said the school contacted the Montreal Science Center and made the decision to discard the glasses as a safety measure, “to avoid the risks associated with non-compliant glasses.”
“This decision was reinforced by the fact that it was impossible to test every pair of glasses that was received,” Bruchi said.
The American Astronomical Society (AAS) said in March that counterfeit glasses are those produced by a single manufacturer with a fraudulent name and artwork printed on them.
“Until recently, the only counterfeit products we knew about were cardboard-framed Eclipse glasses made by an unidentified factory in China but printed with “Mfg. By: American Paper Optics” (APO) about them,” the AAS said on its website. “APO is one of the largest US manufacturers of safe solar viewers and prints its name and address on its eclipse glasses, while the Chinese copycats have APO’s name but not its address.”
The AAS adds that although they are fake, the glasses appear to be safe.
More fakes surfaced after this discovery and the AAS said there was no way to tell fakes from the real thing.
AAS Eclipse Task Force project manager Rick Feinberg said solar filters are at least 1,000 times darker than the darkest regular sunglasses.
He said it was easy to tell if they were unsafe.
“Before April 8, put them indoors and look around,” he said. “You shouldn’t be able to see anything through them, except maybe very bright lights, which should look very faint through the glasses. If you can see anything else, like household furniture or pictures on the wall, your glasses aren’t dark enough for solar viewing.”
St. Jerome’s School spent $2,394 on the glasses, and due to the short turnaround, will not be able to purchase new ones for the students.
