this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
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Anything with asbestos in it. It's just a truly amazing material, with the one catch that it happens to dangerously irritate lung tissues. Relevant XKCD.
Asbestos is mostly bad to the people that work with it, or manufacture products with it. If you have asbestos in your house or building, 99+% of the time it's fine, and you don't need to do anything at all. All of the remediation that we did in the 90s and early 2000s did more harm than good. Like, floor tiles with asbestos; how are the chrystotile fibers embedded in the tile going to break out in enough volume to cause harm to people?
On the other hand, the people that manufactured and installed asbestos-based products were often entirely fucked over.
Asbestos is not harmless to people living with it, all structures need repair and modification eventually (regularly) and unknown asbestos cutting or chipping can be incredibly hazardous.
Undisturbed asbestos is def. harmless to the people living in a structure. The hazards to a homeowner that does their own work will be minimal. The hazards to a professional that does many renovations is pretty significant, because they're likely to see many cases over the years.
It's like cigarettes; one isn't going to hurt you, and even a pack won't hurt you. But regular and repeated exposure will.
It's extremely easy to disturb asbestos, it does not take a large chronic exposure to get health consequences, it takes a very small amount of acute exposure or even less chronic exposure. Generally you will be fine from incidental one-off exposures, but if you live in a home with say, asbestos tiles in your kitchen, or asbestos in the paint or drywall, it can be very easy to build exposure from reno or damage from normal home wear. Not to mention it's extremely expensive to modify because of the required controls, meaning it disproportionately effects low income households, who both struggle to afford preventative maintenance, and struggle to afford the reno.
There's a reason asbestos ppe is decon controls roughly equivalent to mercury, lead, and beryllium.
Asbestos isn't an issue if it isn't airborne, and it's not going to be airborne in any significant amounts if it's in, for instance, tile, pipe insulation, or wallboard, unless you're cutting them for some reason.
"People who become ill from asbestos are usually those who are exposed to it on a regular basis, most often in a job where they work directly with the material or through substantial environmental contact." You are very unlikely to have "substantial" environmental contact in a typical 50s/60s/70s home, unless you are doing substantial renovations, because most of the fibers will be encapsulated in the material they were used with.
Asbestos PPE is made with the understanding that a person that is using it will be working directly with asbestos, or will be exposed to significant amounts. For the typical person, it's as unnecessary as it is to wear PPE to a gun range.
Sibling in existence I know asbestos must be airborne. You aren't refuting anything by repeatedly saying that. Respond to the words I am saying or I can only assume you are copy pasting talking points.
...And what could I say that you wouldn't take as a copypasta talking point? The amount of dust that a homeowner would deal with, even with a fairly modest renovation, simply ain't that much, compared to the people that were ending up with lung cancers and asbestosis. AFAIK, there have been no documented cases of a person contracting either disease simply because they lived in a home that had asbestos, unless they also worked extensively with the mineral.
Did you actually look?
Fun fact: Where I live, there's apparently a loophole where if a building falls down on it's own, you don't have to do as much mitigation work. As a result, there's at least one government building near me that's just being left to sit there and rot, and has been locked up while they rebuild next door.
There's a massive housing crisis and a construction crunch.