From my Gen Z understanding, asbestos was found out to be really toxic and damaging, but how did we purge it like we did lead in most products? I know with other hazardous waste we have to bury it for the foreseeable thousands of years, or it turns into a superfund site. What methods did we manly use to get rid of asbestos? I have also checked search, and search engines extensively to see similar queries but I have found none. So, I see this to be OC if that makes sense, or an original question.
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Asbestos isn’t fully gone. Here in Australia laws were brought in prohibiting manufacture and use of asbestos in new products, and over time it was replaced in buildings and machinery. However there are still heritage listed buildings which cannot be touched, and therefore must be labelled as containing asbestos. Additionally buildings previously identified as having contained/containing asbestos are required to run an asbestos register, identifying the location and type of known asbestos
Most hazardous waste doesn’t need buried for thousands of years, just processed properly. Asbestos can also be processed and made safe, *but* it is much easier and cheaper to throw it out. Wetting it and sealing it is a simple and effective means of trapping it. The water keeps it from separating and entering the air, and the seal keeps the water as well as asbestos in.
Asbestos is really only toxic if you breathe in the dust, so generally the rule is that you have to bury it like you do most landfills, but you have to keep it damp the whole time and you can’t allow it to dry out and be exposed to the air where it might get blown away. It’s not so much that there’s anything *chemically* dangerous, it’s mostly that the particles get stuck in your lungs and cause inflammation.
The short answer is we didn’t, we just banned its use in products.
There is still a lot of asbestos out there particularly in older buildings.
As those buildings get torn down and renovated the asbestos gets removed and replaced with things that are safer. In theory this is done in a safe manner but not always.
Asbestos itself isn’t dangerous if it’s just sitting there, it’s the dust that’s dangerous. So its presence in a building isn’t necessarily harmful until people start messing with it or if there is a fire.
More importantly workers in factories that used to make stuff using asbestos are a lot safer because they aren’t constantly exposed to it in a harmful form anymore.
Asbestos is far from gone. It’s still in old buildings and I think it’s still used in auto parts like brakes.
The process of removing it from a building usually goes: seal off the part of the building that asbestos is being removed from (or sometimes the whole building) with plastic, set up special ventilation systems, workers wearing disposable clothing wet the asbestos-containing material down (so it can’t easily form dust) and remove it, the asbestos-containing material and anything else it touched and the clothing are all double bagged, the sealed waste bags are taken to a landfill with a license to handle asbestos.
We haven’t stopped using it. We stopped widespread use in an uncontrolled way, but there are still plenty of places to find it in use.
Asbestos isn’t toxic. Chemically it’s extremely inert which is why it’s so resistant to fire and heat. The problem is that it’s made up of microscopic fibers that can go airborne. Any that get in you by being swallowed or inhaled are pretty much inside you forever. The bigger fragment will act like little knives tearing up your cells which is how you get the scarring. The smallest ones will act like very tiny knives and can do things like slice up your DNA in the cell nucleus which is how you get cancer.
If we keep those fibers damp it can’t get airborne to harm people and just needs to be disposed of in a way that prevents it from getting into the groundwater. It’s pretty frequent that our solution is to just leave it there. If it’s not a dust-causing form, leaving it there is safer than tearing it out and creating that dust.
It is worth noting that asbestos is only really problematic to humans when you inhale it and it gets into your lungs. This means a solid sheet of asbestos or material the that is sealed away in a building is not going to cause any harm until you start breaking up boards or otherwise damaging it and causing dust.
So we haven’t actually gotten rid of asbestos entirely, we have just stopped producing and using new material – where asbestos is already in use, typically it will just be left in place until we have a reason to move it.
When we do need to move it is when we start having to be careful, but how careful will depend on what type of asbestos or actually is. A common use is asbestos was in the corrugated roof panels often used on garages and other small structures, and this stuff is actually pretty safe – a little care to not break it up or crumble it and cause dust and you can pop it in the back of a van and take it to your local waste/recycling centre who will dispose of it for you.
The trickier one is where it has been installed as a wooly insulation material, or incorporated into something that needs broken up like concrete – because dealing with this is almost impossible to do without creating dust, it needs to be dealt with by a specialist contractor – they will build a tent around the structure so that any dust is contained, then remove the material in sealed containers, generally also using various other dust control methods like respirators and clean suits for workers to protect them, damping down material to prevent airborne dust and so on.
In both cases disposal is essentially the same – because there is no real way to safely break it down and recycle it, into landfill it goes. They just make efforts to seal it up to prevent it leaking out, and things like landfilling it separately to the material that is going to be squashed and broken down by the bulldozers to limit the change of damage and leaks. Once buried safely it is of no real danger unless someone goes to the trouble of digging it up again.
Asbestos is a natural rock. If you grind the rock you can get a mineral fiber that has amazing properties. This mineral fiber unfortunately can destroy people’s lungs very very efficiently.
The solution is to take every thing made with this fiber and bury it. Asbestos is completely natural, as long as you don’t breathe asbestos dust, the material is harmless. Unfortunately all the uses we found for the fiber did include making dust, from brake pads dust, to asbestos clothing dust, to insulation material dust. All the uses we find tend to emit a lot of killer dust.
Solution: Just bury it in a place that is known, so no one goes there digging spreading the killer dust around again. As long as it is buried it can’t spread dust in the air.
In some millennia it will become harmless rock again.
The only complication of getting rid of asbestos is that you need to protect very very well the people that collect it and bring it to the burial. That’s the one and only cost, the hole in the ground is pretty simple.
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