I fix up old buildings and lease them out for a living. As a result I deal with asbestos a lot so I have some background on this issue. I’ve been on sites doing remediation and spent weeks of my life reading reports from surveys so when I read laymen articles and comments about asbestos I find a couple repeated distortions or misnomers. As a result I’d like to shed light on it.
1. “Asbestos” isn’t a single material type. There are generally three types Chrysotile, which looks like a round ball with little spikes on the end, tremolite, which looks like barbed wire and Amosite, which looks like needles.
Tremolite and Amosite are really really bad for you. When you hear about ship insulators that got mesothelioma you are almost certainly hearing about tremolite. It sticks to your lungs and shreds them and those guys were literally spraying it raw in the un ventilated belly of a ship with zero protection.
2. But here’s the thing, almost all the building material asbestos was chrysotile, not nearly as dangerous and generally brought to a construction site already in a building material product. For about 30 years they did slather it everywhere though. Take a building built in 1968 and it’s in the wall board, the ceiling tiles, the vinyl flooring and the glue holding everything to the concrete. It’ll also be all over the a/c piping system as wrapping. Building built in 1955 and never remodeled, you won’t find any.
3. What makes chrysotile dangerous is disturbing it. Disturbing is fancy catchall term for scraping, chipping, tearing it, cutting it, hitting it with a sledgehammer etc. In other words turning it into construction dust through tearing it out to demolish or remodel a building. Sitting there undisturbed it’s really not dangerous at all. People having this misconception about it has led to countless stories I’ve read that basically say “There’s asbestos in the building tear it down and build a new one”. Not really necessary. This is the source of people like the President saying it’s over blown and asbestos is safe. He is talking about chrysotile in inert building materials.
4. But some unscrupulous asbestos removal people make a living off the fear mongering. The reality is that because most building asbestos is fundamentally inert it’s really not that expensive to remove or encapsulate. More than normal demolition for sure but usually not that much more. What gets most laymen is the project set up. See there are really two jobs in a remediation project. There’s the engineers who test everything and set a removal protocol based on type and content and the actual removal company that bids on the job and does the work while the engineer monitors it for safety.
5. When you hear of a building littered with bad asbestos that will cost as much to remove as the building is worth what you are almost certainly witnessing is a case where the engineer and the removal company are colluding with each other. See engineers have a system called point counting which not only measures whether there is asbestos in a material but how much. This affects what gear and measures need to be taken for removal. For instance a piece of drywall with 20% asbestos in the whole thing is a much different thing than where the paper sheathing on the drywall is 2% asbestos containing. It’s the difference between taking out with a mask on and tenting the building.
6. I’m a buy local guy but the one contractor I have who is always from out of town is my asbestos engineer. I hire him specifically because he doesn’t have a symbiotic relationship with local removal contractors. Using that method I once bought a building that five other developers said had 500k in asbestos work in it and spent 30k getting rid of it all. They had all gotten bids and protocols and testing from a single company who had no financial incentive to save them money by actually doing a point count. They had just tested positive or negative and bid the maximum expense removal process as a result. For instance old floor glue could be sanded up at great cost by a guy wearing a full breathing suit or just encapsulated under several layers of sealer and then a new floor laid on top of it.
7. But there’s a weird thing about the regulations which kinda pisses guys like me off. Since crysotile is really only dangerous when disturbed the regulations mostly stop at the removal process being heavily regulated. As a result it was and still is as far as I know legal to make and more importantly import it into the U.S. and sell it. So guess what happened when we started importing a lot of construction materials from places like China? Yep we kept getting more of it. So you had cases of someone remodeling a building and taking the asbestos out and then unwittingly reinstalling it.
8. Imagine being a responsible investor and carefully dealing with the asbestos in your building at great time and expense only to discover that the brand new wall board your contractor put in had brand new asbestos in it? When you investigate the issue you find out that your government is perfectly happy to have you spend tens of thousands of dollars dealing with a safety hazard but doesn’t actually think it’s dangerous enough to tell Lowes and Home Depot they can’t import or sell it anymore.
9. The air particulate thresholds are also very low. Like I said I’ve been on site for removals and part of that process is the engineer sitting there with a particulate counter. On one such occasion the engineer showed me the monitor and told me the maximum number it could show before he had to stop work for the day so things could settle. Then we went outside for lunch break and he brought the monitor with him. He walked me over to a stoplight and said “watch this”. The ambient particle amount was about 120% of what it had been in the building and about 50% of the safe threshold then the light turned red and five cars stopped. The reading shot up to 300% of the allowed limit. I asked how that happened and he explained they still put asbestos and other materials in brake pads and that was all the particles coming off the brakes to stop the cars. I was speechless, and now drive with my windows up!
So is asbestos removal a racket? Yes it can be if you aren’t careful. Does it need some reform? Absolutely. The big ones I’d hit are the laws that make it illegal for a property owner to test their property themselves, yes in some places you commit a crime if you take a putty knife, scrape a sample into a bag and mail it to lab for testing without a asbestos remediation license. If that doesn’t scream racket I don’t know what does. Yes, I’ve busted people defrauding me on what has asbestos in it and what does not violating that law.
I’d also require approval for making or importing anything with it and clear labeling to let end buyers know it’s in the product they are buying otherwise this is an issue that’s going to keep on happening. Outright bans in building construction materials would also help so we can spend 20 years getting rid of it all and then not have to worry about it anymore. For about ten years we had to do a new asbestos survey for every demolition or construction job even after we started testing all new materials going in and had old surveys. That was basically a $500 fee on every new small business we rented to. I’m sure some states still have that requirement and it would nice to be able to get rid of it because the problem is solved.
Note: I wrote this yesterday and didn’t check back until this morning so I’m adding this to address some comments.
1. I’m not saying asbestos is safe. Mining it definitely is not. Building things with it isn’t either since cutting it will create dangerous particulate dust.
2. I’m not advocating using it. In fact I specifically recommend a ban on it’s manufacture, sale or use because it is dangerous to make and install and a pain to deal with after it is. I spent several paragraphs talking through the fundamental gaps that exist in it’s regulation.
3. I didn’t address the issues around it’s mining and manufacture because that’s not my area of expertise.
4. I’m not agreeing with the President but I did hope to shed light on where what he is saying is coming from and add more context to the discussion. It was in response to another diary where there really wasn’t any context in his comments.
