Asbestos is miracle stuff though. Fantastic insulation material. You can affordably fill your attic with loose asbestos, and it’s a mould resistant, fire resistant insulator. Better for almost all current alternatives. Great for roof tiles too. Will last forever.
Heat resistant, chemical resistant, strong, muffles sound, doesn’t conduct electricity… there’s a reason there’s still so much of the stuff everywhere in buildings.
Obviously, there’s is the whole significantly increased risk of painful death thing. But if it wasn’t for that one small detail, it’s really so much better than the alternatives for so many applications.
Great for all those things someone has to make, someone else has to install, someone else has to service, and someone else has to discard. There’s no safe level.
One interesting fact is that Roman historian Pliny the Elder wrote about the stiff lungs and early deaths of tribes who mined asbestos in the first century.
And appreciation of this health risk was lost to time until the 1950s.
