(Replying to PARENT post)
Asbestos is only prohibited where there are practical alternatives.
The problem with asbestos is it was used where there was no rationale for its use beyond profits as a bulk material.
Those profits were only available because the health costs were externalized.
The existence of practical alternatives is the reason asbestos abatement is possible. The cost of abatement is almost entirely the removal and disposal, the cost of replacement materials is not a major factor.
(Replying to PARENT post)
If you have to do such a thing every time you are rebuilding something it is not going to economic.
(Replying to PARENT post)
It’s just not worth having in any building you want to ever make any alterations to… And the only reason to have it would be just to have the same insulation value with a slightly thinner panel than what we’ll replace it with!
(Replying to PARENT post)
If the rate was high enough I bet we'd phase it out. Don't underestimate the importance of the size of the effect.
(Replying to PARENT post)
We (the US) still allow asbestos in certain scenarios in an attempt to keep the baby and the profits. https://www.maacenter.org/asbestos/products/. Talc especially has had a lot of attention in the last year or so.
I think there is also a pretty big difference between how people view a material with undesirable qualities such as electric causing fires, or wood being flammable, compared to asbestos damaging the individual.
(Replying to PARENT post)
Yeah, cause they often (as I understand) were not using proper protective measures to keep from inhaling the dust particles. A common thing I have seen on construction sites of all sorts, is the workers refusing to use some thing or the other, because it makes them uncomfortable, or harder to see (but still can) or harder to breath (but still can) or some other jackanapes idea like that.
> Yet we spent an ungodly amount of money and time stripping asbestos from buildings that had been there for decades not causing any problems. Ironically, directly exposing people to asbestos in the process (more than you'd ever be exposed to it was left undisturbed).
This is where things get real fun. When moist or absolutely damp/wet, asbestos is basically harmless (to the lungs) because it's almost impossible to breath it in at that point. If you somehow manage to breath that in, you have to basically be trying to do it. When it is dryer than chalk on a hot summers day with 0% humidity though, then yeah it can cause all sorts of problems. But even then, people removing it tend to do the thing that the other prior mentioned construction workers (often) won't do.
They wear gloves, have masks on; and even are running some form of proper ventilation. And so much of the issue is averted.
Then comes the media and government. They take edge case scenarios like these, and hype them up; whilst mixing in the prior construction workers into the data. This makes things look worse than they really are.
It's not just Asbestos you can find this sort of thing with them. You can find media and government doing this with many things if you look carefully.
But that being said, none of this is to say that Asbestos isn't a problem at all. It's just to say that Asbestos gets the treatment it does for the same reason we have warning labels on nearly everything.
We placate and protect the stupid... stupidly.
(Replying to PARENT post)
Rather than focusing on the safe use of a material, we instead lean towards removing it all together. Older materials with known faults (such as wood being flammable) are deemed acceptable simply due to having known weaknesses in a period where we didn't care about safety. If we found out wood causes cancer, we'd still use it in building and furniture because we've always used it in building and furniture.
It's not an economies of scale problem.
When you get right down to it, the people that got mesothelioma from asbestos pretty much universally directly worked with it (usually in the form of doing things like blowing it in loose form for insulation).
Yet we spent an ungodly amount of money and time stripping asbestos from buildings that had been there for decades not causing any problems. Ironically, directly exposing people to asbestos in the process (more than you'd ever be exposed to it was left undisturbed).