Written by Matthew Wadge
Once a wondrous group of materials that was used in many applications, from household insulation to fireproofing to the fake snow used in films (crazy, right?), nowadays it is banned (not everywhere though!), but what happened to cause such a widely used material to be banned? Below, we travel through its history from discovery, use, and eventual banning in the UK.
Discovered thousands of years ago, and found naturally, asbestos is a group of materials that are made of very small fibres. They became very popular in the 1800s and 1900s due to their impressive properties: they are strong, don’t burn or become damaged from chemical or biological exposure, and can be woven into various materials.
Due to their impressive properties, asbestos has been widely used in building insulation, car brakes, floor tiles, fireproofing, medical stitches, gas masks, and even can be seen as fake snow in classic films such as The Wizard of Oz!
Despite asbestos’s impressive properties and use in many products, it hid a scary secret. Tiny fibres from asbestos can break off and float in the air. If people breathe them in, they can get stuck in the lungs and cause serious health problems many years later, like lung disease and cancer. The scary part? These problems don’t show up right away; they can take decades! Scientists and doctors started noticing these health issues in people who worked with asbestos. Over time, countries around the world began to ban its use to keep people safe. In the UK, asbestos was finally banned in 1999.
Today, we know asbestos is dangerous, and special teams are trained to remove it safely from old buildings. Learning about asbestos helps us understand how science and safety go hand-in-hand, and why it’s important to ask questions about the materials we use every day. Knowing what we know now, you must feel sorry for the actors in films that used asbestos as fake snow, people who had stitches made of it, and anyone who used an asbestos gas mask!
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