Millions of tonnes of asbestos are being removed from buildings around the world – can this dangerous mineral be disposed of permanently? Or even be put to good use?
At a small industrial unit in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, a killer is being broken down so it is no longer harmful. Large sheets of asbestos cement are shredded and wettened. Through milling and heating, an alkaline slurry is created, which the company says dissolves the asbestos fibres. The process turns the fibres of this toxic mineral, together with the cement, into a harmless material. This material can then be reused - as calcium silicate hydrate – in concrete mixtures in the construction industry. As more and more asbestos is dumped into landfills and the environment, this undertaking is one of a growing number of potential solutions for a global waste problem.
In 2019, it was estimated that around 200 million tonnes of asbestos had been produced globally (not counting production in the previous decade), for use in items such as water pipes. When disturbed, the fibres become airborne and, when breathed in, can damage the lungs and airways, potentially leading to cancer.
Most ends up in landfill buried with other rubbish in the hope it remains trapped. But there are concerns that the fibres can escape into the environment and get into water supplies, even becoming airborne. So there is need for a more permanent solution. Enter companies such as Asbeter in the Netherlands, who are at the forefront of developing ways of breaking down harmful asbestos fibres permanently, or so they hope.
This article is part of a cross-border investigation on asbestos in water pipes, which is made in a collaboration between Investigative Reporting Denmark, IRPIMedia in Italy, Oštro Slovenia and Oštro Croatia, Reporters Foundation in Poland, the BBC and TV2 Nord in Denmark. The investigation is supported by Journalism fund Europe.
A study published in 2018 estimated that 255,000 deaths occur globally each year due to exposure to asbestos. Most of these deaths occur in people who were exposed at work, but some experts such as Arthur Frank, professor of environmental and occupational health at Drexel University in Philadelphia, believe that the risk posed by environmental exposure has been underestimated. A number of studies have strongly suggested that both men and women experiencing such environmental exposure, such as living near asbestos factories, former mines and landfill sites where the mineral has been dumped, are at risk.
According to the European Commission, the volume of asbestos-containing materials in the EU is likely to exceed 100 million tonnes. And although global production has declined, asbestos is still being mined. Around 1.3 million tonnes of asbestos were mined in 2022, according to the US Geological Survey, with most coming from Russia and Kazakhstan, followed by Brazil and China. Just last week, the US announced that it would ban all forms of asbestos, taking the number of countries with a ban to nearly 70. But there are still enormous amounts of the mineral hidden inside buildings and water pipes all over the world.
As aging buildings begin to crumble, the asbestos has to be removed. But there simply isn't enough space for it in existing landfills, says Yvonne Waterman, a lawyer and president of the European Asbestos Forum (EAF), an annual gathering of policy-makers, campaigners, scientists and companies committed to confronting the challenge of asbestos. "People forget that removing asbestos is basically just changing its location from A to B," Waterman says.
The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that more than 30 million tonnes of asbestos were used in the US between 1990 and 1980. In 1989 a partial ban came into place, but the US has continued to import asbestos up until this year, so the figures will be even higher now.
In the UK, some sources, such as the Trades Union Congress estimate that around six million tonnes of asbestos were used to make products, such as sheeting, in around 1.5 million buildings. A report by British asbestos industry experts last year found that of the asbestos they analysed, 70% of was damaged and 30% was in the highest risk category, which needed to be either dealt with urgently or removed.
At least 230,000 tonnes of waste containing asbestos are estimated to go to landfill every year in England (a detailed picture was provided by the government in 2011 but removal has accelerated since then). Parliamentarians and campaigners are urging the removal of asbestos from non-residential buildings within a 40 year timeframe. At current rates, experts such as Graham Gould, who runs the asbestos denaturing company, Thermal Recycling, estimate it would take at least 25 years to move to landfill.
In Australia, where an ambitious plan to manage and remove asbestos is in place, it is estimated that over 1.2 million tonnes of asbestos containing materials were disposed of into landfill in 2022-2023 - giving a sense of the scale of the challenge. No such tracking of asbestos waste is available for the US.
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"All asbestos just goes to landfill," says Gould. "Once it’s in landfill, it just stays there forever. People talk about removing asbestos but no asbestos has ever been removed, it has just been shifted from one place to another."
Gould has thus spent over ten years working on a plan for asbestos that currently goes into landfill – "denaturing" it, or changing its properties, so the dangerous set of minerals we know as asbestos are no longer harmful. Gould’s technique uses heat to cause "physical and chemical changes so that what is left is simply not asbestos", he says.
Gould claims that a full-scale processing plant could denature up to 30,000 tonnes a year - the company currently has a permit from the UK's Environment Agency to treat 29,500 tonnes a year. Its demonstration plant, near Wolverhampton, currently handles smaller volumes. "You cannot recycle asbestos as it is hazardous," Gould says. The technique his company has developed uses the denatured fibres to create a dry and inert product, called Calmag, which is an alternative to cement that can be used in the construction industry, such as paving stones. It can be used in place of traditional cement, which accounts for 5-8% of the world's annual human-caused carbon dioxide emissions.
Gould is frustrated with the lack of progress on this huge problem. Although he says he has had interest in the technique from all over the world, he believes governments need to be more proactive about finding alternative ways of getting rid of asbestos instead of landfill. "Asbestos is safer in a hole in the ground than in buildings, but it's a temporary solution, once it’s in landfill it doesn’t degrade or degenerate, it is there forever," he says. "Landfill is not a solution, it doesn't achieve anything except taking it out of buildings."
This is exemplified in countries such as Poland, where a national asbestos removal programme is aiming to remove all asbestos from buildings in the country by 2032. France and the Netherlands are also commencing at least partial removal of some asbestos products. The regional government of Flanders, in Belgium, has created what they call an "Asbestos Abatement Action Plan" to remove an estimate of nearly 3 million tonnes of decaying asbestos containing material by 2040.
Dumping asbestos: An unequal problem
Asbestos waste management policies in the UK, on the face of it, seem to be stringent, with the regulations stating that asbestos must be double-bagged and placed in a covered and locked skip. According to an Environmental Information Regulations Request made by the BBC to the UK's Environment Agency, there are 29 landfills capable of taking asbestos in England and Wales. Whilst some are isolated, a number are near housing and one in four are in deprived areas, including Darlington, Chesterfield, Hartlepool, Rugby and Teesport.
In the US, studies have shown that toxic landfills (which contain everything from asbestos to arsenic and dangerous chemicals) are almost always located in areas where people of colour and poorer communities live. One of the largest dumps that accepts hazardous waste is found close to Emelle, Alabama – a poor town, whose residents are predominantly black.
But in Poland, landfills are already full up and unable to cope with additional asbestos-laden building waste. Poland’s national abatement programme was launched in 2002 after around two million tonnes of asbestos had been imported into the country and spread into around 15.5 million tonnes of products. All such waste was designated for landfills that can handle hazardous waste by wrapping in a plastic foil called polyethylene before being placed into special pits with strengthened sides and capped with 2m (6ft) of soil to prevent any fibres being released. The programme found that they would need 84 landfills to cope with the country's asbestos. But by 2022, there were just 59 asbestos landfills, and only 31 were widely available for such waste. Asbestos sheeting is instead being dumped, dangerously, in public places.
At a European level, “disposing of asbestos waste in landfill is not a viable long-term solution as the waste will have to be dealt with by future generations", according to a resolution on asbestos passed by the European Parliament in 2021. Instead, it pushed for the development of cost-effective methods to deactivate asbestos fibres in ways that would mean they no longer posed a public health risk. The European Commission eventually chose not to adopt this part of the resolution in the Asbestos at Work Directive, which came into force late in 2023.
It is clear that landfill is only ever going to be a temporary solution for the enormous volumes of asbestos waste emerging around the world. Recently, research has found that asbestos particles can travel long distances underground within aquifers and through land, and could even become airborne in turbulent water or if the soil is disturbed.
Testing of a vast illegal dumping ground known as Mobuoy, near Derry, Northern Ireland, has detected asbestos fibres in soil nearby, along with other pollutants, according to an official report. There is ongoing sampling of the water in the nearby river Faughan, just a few miles away, because of fears that asbestos fibres and other contaminants may end up in Derry’s drinking water.
Indeed, flooding at landfill sites also risks washing asbestos out into the environment. Of the UK's 21,000 historic landfill sites, over 1200 are located on flood plains. More than 10,000 historic landfill sites in Europe are at risk of flooding and erosion. As climate change brings more extreme weather, these sites are likely to be more at risk. Climate-change related events such as floods are also accelerating the rate at which buildings containing asbestos degrade or are damaged, according to the Australian Safety and Eradication Agency.
There are now, however, an emerging number of techniques for disposing of asbestos in other ways. Heating asbestos waste or blasting it with microwaves has been found to destroy the fibres. Other alternatives are to treat the fibres with chemicals so they change shape, or denature, or to encapsulate it inside another material such as glass.
A handful of companies have been grappling with these different techniques on a small scale in different countries.
In Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, the BBC met one such asbestos denaturing pioneer: Asbeter, the company behind the process described at the beginning of this article.
During a tour of their demonstration plant, Inez Postema, the founder and director of the company, explains how it works. First, asbestos cement roofing-sheets (the company has plans to use the same process later for water pipes) are shredded and then milled in an alkaline solution to break it into small particles without it becoming airborne. The resulting slurry is heated below 100C (212F), creating a chemical reaction that breaks down the asbestos fibres. A harmless raw material is produced, which, as calcium silicate hydrate, can be re-used in the building and paint industry.
"Millions of tonnes of raw material are put into landfill due to the contamination and instead we can use 100% of it again," says Postema. She adds that the Dutch government’s environmental agency has issued Asbeter with an end of waste certificate and that the independent testing agency, Det Norske Veritas, also issued it with a verification notice, confirming that its process has dissolved all asbestos fibres from asbestos containing materials, creating an asbestos-free residue. Asbeter hopes to have a full scale plant in operation by 2026.
Postema's vision is to build a plant capable of processing 25,000 tonnes a year at first, growing to 75,000 tonnes a year, including drinking water pipes and sheeting.
Other companies using similar techniques to break down asbestos are springing up. In addition, some scientific teams are investigating to what they call bioremediation to solve the asbestos problem. Fungi or even lichen can help to break down or at least cover old asbestos workings and prevent fibres becoming airborne. Other teams are looking at whether they can create what they call "activated landfills" using bacteria, fungi and plants.
Sean Fitzgerald, a geologist who was the director of research and legal services at the American Scientific Analytical Institute and is now CEO of his own consulting company, has over 35 years studying the science and geology of asbestos. He says that there is no one solution or silver bullet in dealing with waste asbestos. "As a geologist, I'm looking at denaturing as applying some force to change [asbestos] from one phase to another phase". He adds that just putting asbestos into landfill is dangerous, particularly with climate change. "There is no way you can simply cover it up without it being potentially a problem some day."
One of those denaturing techniques is to use heat. A company in the south of France, Inertam, uses technology to heat the asbestos to a very high temperature, turning it into a glass like substance. The plant has authorisation to process 8,000 tonnes a year but the process is expensive. The company did not respond to a request for an interview.
While still only small scale and expensive, such measures could be essential to avoid what some campaigners and researchers describe as a fourth wave of exposure to asbestos. The first wave consisted of people working directly with the product and their families. The second involved those who installed asbestos-containing products, while the third included people living in buildings with damaged asbestos. A fourth wave would be from environmental exposure around landfills, in the air and also from water, which some researchers, including Frank, argue has been under-recognised. Not everyone agrees – the World Health Organization maintains there is insufficient evidence to prove that ingesting asbestos through water will pose a risk to human health. (Read more about what asbestos in drinking water might mean for human health.)
What is clear is that the amount of asbestos currently locked away in buildings, water pipes and other infrastructure around the world will soon need to be removed. Burying it will only delay the problem.
* This is the second article of a two-part investigation. Part-one – published in January 2024 – examines what happens when asbestos gets into water supplies.
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