Asbestos

• 1. Introduction

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  Asbestos has been woven into human civilization for at least 4,500 years, yet for much of that time it was celebrated as a kind of miracle. A substance that would not burn, could be spun into cloth, and could outlast any fire. Today, around 255,000 people are thought to die from asbestos-related diseases every single year. How did a mineral once described by the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder as more expensive than pearls become one of the most tightly regulated hazardous materials on earth? And why, despite bans in 66 countries, does it remain in hundreds of millions of buildings worldwide, still mined and exported in enormous quantities, still quietly claiming lives decades after first exposure?

• 2. A Name Born from Myth

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  Pliny the Elder, writing in his first-century manuscript Natural History, used the Latin term asbestinon, meaning "unquenchable," to describe the mineral. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that Pliny applied the word incorrectly. In the original Greek, "asbestos" actually referred to quicklime, not to the fibrous mineral at all. The mineral's correct ancient Greek name was amiantos, meaning "undefiled" or "pure," because when thrown into fire it emerged unmarked. That name proved more durable than Pliny's misnomer in much of the world: Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and French all retain amiante or amianto as the standard word. English briefly used "amiant" in the early 15th century, but "asbestos" eventually won out, carrying with it a mythological weight it had never rightly owned. The word first appeared in English in the 1600s, though the substance it named had already been in human hands for millennia.

• 3. Ancient Wonders and Royal Napkins

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  Archaeological evidence places asbestos use in the Lake Juojärvi region of East Finland roughly 4,500 years ago, where inhabitants mixed the mineral anthophyllite into earthenware pots to strengthen them. Scholars call this style of pottery "asbestos-ceramic." The sculptor Callimachus is credited with fashioning a golden lamp called asbestos lychnis for the Erechtheion, whose wick would never burn. Athanasius of Alexandria, a Christian bishop living in 4th-century Egypt, wrote around the year 318 about a substance from India that could make a person fireproof if they wrapped themselves in it. Wealthy Persians used asbestos cloths as a party trick, cleaning a napkin simply by throwing it into flames. The Sassanian king Khosrow II Parviz, who reigned from 590 to 628, reportedly owned such a napkin according to the historian Tabari. Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor, who ruled from 800 to 814, is said to have possessed an asbestos tablecloth. Marco Polo recounts being shown what he describes as a vein from which "the cloth which we call of salamander, which cannot be burnt if it is thrown into the fire, is made." The Persians themselves believed the fiber came from the fur of a creature called the samandar that lived inside fire and died when exposed to water. This creature became the origin of the later European belief that the salamander could survive flames.

• 4. The Industrial Machine

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  Early attempts at producing asbestos paper and cloth in Italy in the 1850s failed to find a market. The real turning point came when Canadian asbestos samples were displayed in London in 1862, sparking enough interest that the first companies were formed in England and Scotland to exploit the resource. German industrialist Louis Wertheim adopted the process of spinning asbestos into yarn for his factories. In 1871, the Patent Asbestos Manufacturing Company was established in Glasgow, and the Clydebank area grew into the center of this emerging industry. Industrial-scale mining began in the Thetford Hills of Quebec from the 1870s. Sir William Edmond Logan, serving as head of the Geological Survey of Canada, was the first to identify the large chrysotile deposits there. With the opening of the Quebec Central Railway in 1876, entrepreneurs Andrew Stuart Johnson and William Henry Jeffrey built up the provincial industry. The mines produced 50 tons in 1878; by the 1890s, with machine technologies in place, output had climbed past 10,000 tonnes. For a long time, the world's largest asbestos mine was the Jeffrey Mine in the town of Asbestos, Quebec. South African mining began in 1893 under Francis Oates, director of De Beers, and the first production of amosite began there in 1910. In the United States, the industry dates to 1858, when fibrous anthophyllite was mined at Ward's Hill on Staten Island by the Johns Company, a predecessor to Johns Manville. US consumption peaked at 804,000 tons in 1973, while world demand peaked around 1977, with 25 countries producing nearly 4.8 million metric tons annually.

• 5. Smoke Without Fire

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  The 1898 Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops in the United Kingdom noted the negative health effects of asbestos; the finding was contributed by Lucy Deane Streatfeild, one of the first women factory inspectors in Britain. A year later, H. Montague Murray noted similar effects, and the first documented death related to asbestos exposure occurred in 1906. Murray's own study at Charing Cross Hospital in London in 1900 examined a young man who had worked for 14 years in an asbestos textile factory and died of pulmonary fibrosis; the postmortem found asbestos traces in his lungs. Adelaide Anderson, Inspector of Factories in Britain, placed asbestos on a list of harmful industrial substances in 1902. Similar investigations followed in France in 1906 and Italy in 1908. The first formal diagnosis of asbestosis was made in the UK in 1924, when Nellie Kershaw, who had been employed at Turner Brothers Asbestos in Rochdale, Greater Manchester since 1917, spinning raw asbestos fibre into yarn, died and her case went to inquest. Pathologist William Edmund Cooke testified that her lungs showed "particles of mineral matter... of various shapes, but the large majority have sharp angles," and he concluded they "originated from asbestos and were, beyond a reasonable doubt, the primary cause of the fibrosis of the lungs and therefore of death." The inquiry that followed was led by E. R. A. Merewether and C. W. Price, whose report was presented to Parliament on the 24th of March 1930. It found that 66% of workers employed for 20 years or more suffered from asbestosis. The first asbestos industry regulations came into effect on the 1st of March 1932. The term mesothelioma first appeared in medical literature in 1931; its connection to asbestos was noted sometime in the 1940s. Court documents established in the late 1970s that asbestos industry officials had known of the dangers since the 1930s and had concealed this from the public.

• 6. Six Minerals, One Hazard

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  The US Environmental Protection Agency defines six mineral types as asbestos, falling into two broad classes: serpentine and amphibole. All six are known human carcinogens. Chrysotile, the only serpentine fiber, accounts for about 95% of the asbestos found in buildings in America according to the EPA's Asbestos Building Inspectors Manual. It is more flexible than amphiboles and can be spun and woven into fabric. Its most common use was corrugated asbestos cement roofing, primarily for warehouses and garages. Chrysotile has appeared in products ranging from brake linings and floor tiles to gas mask filters, which were used through World War II until the 1960s in most countries, and in Germany and the USSR, civilian-issued gas mask filters tested positive for asbestos as late as 1988. The amphibole group includes amosite, which appears grey-white under a microscope and is commonly called brown asbestos, and crocidolite, known as blue asbestos. Cigarette manufacturer Lorillard used crocidolite asbestos in the "Micronite" filter of its Kent cigarette from 1952 to 1956. Amosite and crocidolite are considered the most hazardous fiber types. The use of all amphibole types was banned across much of the Western world by the mid-1980s, and in Japan by 1995. Mesothelioma after diagnosis carries a life expectancy of less than 12 months, and the latency period from first exposure to diagnosis is typically 20 years, which is why deaths continue to accumulate long after direct use has ended.

• 7. Contamination Beyond Construction

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  Asbestos reached consumers through unexpected routes. In 2000, tests at a certified asbestos-testing laboratory found tremolite asbestos in three out of eight popular brands of children's crayons made partly from talc: Crayola, Prang, and RoseArt. In Crayola crayons, asbestos levels reached as high as 2.86% in the Orchid shade. Thirty-two different crayon types from these brands contained more than trace amounts of asbestos. The talc was supplied by R T Vanderbilt Co of Gouverneur, New York. In June 2000, Binney & Smith, the maker of Crayola, and the other manufacturers agreed to stop using talc in their products. In July 2024, the World Health Organization heightened its warning about talc, reclassifying it from "possibly carcinogenic" to "probably carcinogenic" in a study published in The Lancet. A different contamination route ran through the vermiculite mine operated by W. R. Grace and Company in Libby, Montana, which exposed workers and community residents to asbestos, typically richterite, winchite, actinolite, or tremolite. This material was marketed as Zonolite insulation and distributed into residential and commercial buildings across Canada and the United States. The EPA began cleanup in Libby in 1999 and the area is now a Superfund cleanup site. On the 12th of July 2018, a Missouri jury ordered Johnson & Johnson to pay $4.69 billion to 22 women who alleged the company's talc-based products, including its baby powder, caused ovarian cancer.

• 8. A Crisis Still Unfolding

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  Russia produced an estimated 790,000 tonnes of asbestos in 2020, making it the world's top producer. In 2017, global mining totalled 1.3 million tonnes, with Russia accounting for 53% of that figure, followed by Kazakhstan at 16%, China at 15%, and Brazil at 11.5%. Asia consumes roughly 70% of all asbestos produced worldwide. In Vietnam, about 90% of imported chrysotile goes into producing approximately 100 million square metres of cement roofing sheets annually, yet one study found that among 300 families in Yen Bai and Thanh Hoa, 85% used asbestos roofing but only 5% were aware of the health risks. In Australia, two out of three homes built between World War II and the early 1980s still contain asbestos, and the head of the Australian Council of Trade Unions has called on the government to rid the country of asbestos by 2030. In January 2024, asbestos was found in garden mulch supplied to dozens of parks, playgrounds, and schools across Sydney, triggering what became known as the Sydney asbestos mulch crisis. The United States moved to ban chrysotile only in 2024, under what the EPA called the Part 1 Chrysotile Asbestos rule, with compliance required by 2037. In the Hampton Roads shipbuilding area, mesothelioma rates run seven times the national average. South Korea, by contrast, became the world's sixth country to enact an asbestos harm aid act in 2011, entitling any citizen diagnosed with an asbestos-related disease to free lifetime medical care and monthly government income. The town of Wittenoom in Western Australia, built around a blue asbestos mine, remains so contaminated that authorities have removed it from maps and road signs.