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The Wonderful Uses of Asbestos (1942) [video]
- simonebrunozzi 6y agoFrom Wikipedia: "... Asbestos use dates back at least 4,500 years" I didn't realize that humanity has been using it for so long. In Italy (where I'm from) it's called Amianto, but also Eternit, the name of a Swiss company that used to produce it. There was a big scandal and a lawsuit in the 80s against that company, and then the Asbestos was banned from use. [0] [0]: https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/lawsuit-against-eternit-re-asbestos-exposure-in-italy/ https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/lawsuit-...
- chadcmulligan 6y agoSame in Australia - there was an ongoing law suit for years with James Hardie Industries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hardie_Industries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hardie_Industries
- refurb 6y agoIt's a pretty remarkable material when you think about it. Flexible, fire resistant, insulating. Not surprising it found so many uses.
- jacquesm 6y agohttps://www.eternit.si/en/about-the-company/history/ https://www.eternit.si/en/about-the-company/history/
- jansan 6y agoEternit is still available in a new form without Asbestos. Parts of our house are covered with it. I find it really interesting that they are still using the old name that is associated with Asbestos. I mean you would not call a new tranquilizer Contergan.
- kolinko 6y agoThey also sell flower pots. Seriously considering buying one now just to be able to tell guests: “see that flowerpot? it’s from Eternit!”
- b0rsuk 6y agoHow about Coca Cola, named after cocaine and kola nuts?
- gambiting 6y agoWhat about it?
- b0rsuk 6y agoThey haven't changed the name either...
- gambiting 6y agoYeah but why would they? People avoid using asbestos in the name because it kills you. Coca Cola is still made from.....Coca beans. It's not named after cocaine you know.
- throwaway2048 6y agoIts named after coca leaves, the same thing cocaine is named after (and is obtained from), and used to contain cocaine.
- shepherdjerred 6y agoCoca cola is named after coca leaves, which is where cocaine is derived from. Coca cola still uses extract from the leaves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola > The drink's name refers to two of its original ingredients: coca leaves, and kola nuts (a source of caffeine). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca > Coca is known for its psychoactive alkaloid, cocaine.
- baybal2 6y agoI lived in a house with asbestos-cement roof, and an apartment with asbestos-cement drywall when I was living in Russia. Didn't die, or anything, just as much as nearly all ex-USSR states population. That stuff was everywhere there. I believe the stuff is largely benign depending on asbestos having larger fiber sizes, and being weathered, or painted over.
- Guthur 6y agoIt is largely benign when left alone. The problem is working with and disposing of it, it's a hazardous material and so can be expensive to deal with in many developed countries.
- coderdd 6y agoThere was discussion here a while ago, that effect is genetically affected as well. Some people have traits which makes them weak against asbestos, some go without problems.
- selimthegrim 6y agoLink/citation?
- mprovost 6y agoYup. When I was renovating my 100 year old house I discovered that behind the weatherboards/clapboards was a layer of old, mostly broken asbestos panelling. I called a specialist disposal firm and they quoted two prices - one for internal removal (I was only renovating the inside) and the other for external. External is a lot cheaper - for internal removals they have to seal off the rest of the house and place air quality monitors and check them for some time after the removal to make sure that there are no loose particles floating around. So it was cheaper to finish redoing the plasterboard inside the house, then remove all of the external weatherboards, have them come and do an external removal, and then rebuild with new weatherboards. The price difference made it worth it, even including buying all new weatherboards!
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- noja 6y agoAsbestos is co-located in the ground with talc (talcum powder).
- scottlocklin 6y agoPeople noticed: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/october-2020-talc-lawsuit-update-johnson-johnson-agrees-to-pay-100-million https://www.natlawreview.com/article/october-2020-talc-lawsu... I never understood why one might use talc over, say, chalk or corn starch.
- b0rsuk 6y agoI didn't realize eternit contained asbestos. This stuff is all over village roofs and garden sheds.
- asddubs 6y agothey still make it, now without asbestos in it, but most of it around you probably does contain asbestos if it's older than ~50 years
- rainbowzootsuit 6y agoPeople believed that asbestos was salamander fur dating back to Aristotle and Pliney the Elder. https://www.wired.com/2014/08/fantastically-wrong-homicidal-salamander/ https://www.wired.com/2014/08/fantastically-wrong-homicidal-... I first learned about this doing background reading of _Fahrenheit 451_ where the firemen's logo is the burning salamander as well as their fire truck being called a salamander. http://self.gutenberg.org/eBooks/WPLBN0100000519-Fahrenheit-451-by-Bradbury-Ray.aspx http://self.gutenberg.org/eBooks/WPLBN0100000519-Fahrenheit-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legendary_salamander_in_popular_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legendary_salamander_in_popula... There's also a popular cooking appliance used in commercial kitchens which is basically a stand-alone broiler that's referred to as a salamander,
- jtwaleson 6y agoIncredible video. Makes you wonder how many of those workers and users died. You will only find out that something went wrong 30 years later and that is horrifying for people that still have asbestos in their homes and offices.
- konjin 6y agoGiven that this was the 50s and they the majority were over 20 I'd guess pretty much all of them.
- armedpacifist 6y agoAs stated somewhere above, the problem with old eternit or asbestos containing products isn't that it 'leaks'. It's only problematic when you start processing it. It will then release microscopic airborne needles that will get stuck in your respiratory system, traveling through tissue and causing serious damage. The damage is caused physically, not chemically. It also requires a pretty systematic exposure to the stuff, which is why mostly (factory) workers and the neighborhoods surrounding those factories were seeing the most severe cases. Plus the process takes years, which is why it stayed unnoticed for so long (minus the cover ups). Health hazards aside it's a pretty remarkable product that was cheap at the same time. Exactly why it was used for pretty much everything. Don't get me wrong, the stuff is bad, but I do think that some, if not most people react almost histerically when they know they are in the vicinity of asbestos. Living in a house with asbestos shingles for instance poses very little health hazards, on the condition that the shingles aren't being disturbed by anything that causes friction. Of course, you don't control your neighbor's roof... If you have small quantities at home that you need to dispose of make sure it's wet and don't break or saw it.
- hyko 6y agoWell, processing it or it weathers, releasing the fibres into the atmosphere.
- NiceWayToDoIT 6y agoJust wondering, if damage is mechanical, how many new materials are not safe in the same way? We live in nano age, what are the chances that Graphene or any other nano material can have similar effect over long period of time?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- TaylorAlexander 6y agoMade me want to find some promo videos for Roundup aka glyphosate and I found this gem: https://youtu.be/EnxnYIAPa10 https://youtu.be/EnxnYIAPa10 There is some debate as to whether or not glyphosate presents a direct cancer risk, but certainly the more I learn about regenerative farming, biocides like this seem to cause more harm than good. Really I’m talking about the mass use of glyphosate in farming - the uses in this linked video aren’t that bad - but the confident and carefree voice over reminded me of the asbestos video. Anyway in another 50 years time we may look back on videos like this the same way we look at the asbestos video.
- scottlocklin 6y agoLooking around at all the enormously fat people, I suspect it's more likely to be thyroid and biome problems than cancer. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6915086/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6915086/ https://www.gmoscience.org/glyphosate-and-roundup-disrupt-the-gut-microbiome-by-inhibiting-the-shikimate-pathway/ https://www.gmoscience.org/glyphosate-and-roundup-disrupt-th... I'm happy to pay more for, say, beans which aren't soaked in glyphosate. It's really bonkers how Monsanto has succeeded in putting this shit everywhere.
- bregma 6y agoMy grandfather was manager of the spinning mill in a one-industry town called Asbestos, Quebec (guess what that industry was). I have a picture of him modelling a tailored asbestos-fibre suit standing in front of the spinning mules, white dust coating everything. Makes you skin crawl, but when he died it was more likely due to exposure to carcinogens during his time on the front in the Great War. We had knit asbestos gloves at our house when I was young, and chunks of chrysotile you could just peel for hours as a distraction. It had many wonderful uses.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago> and chunks of chrysotile you could just peel for hours as a distraction. Like mercury for poor people
- b0rsuk 6y agoPeople have the right to be wary of inventions like GMO and 5G. Burk & Braun used to produce Radium Schokolade, Hippman-Blach bakery - Radium Bread. Dr. Alfred Curie (not related) used to sell toothpaste with radium+thorium. Impotence treatments for men contained the element (inventor died of bladder cancer). Ancient Romans loved lead, not just for water pipes but for cups and vats they used to boil defrutum, a very popular syrup added to wine. Westerners love chairs and shoes. I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel now, but Americans use feet and inches ;-).
- gambiting 6y agoI honestly don't know if that's comparable. Romans didn't have any way to know the dangers of lead. Early 20th century people had very limited knowledge on radioactivity. Now you can read up about non-ionizing radiation as much as you like, for free, and discover that despite hundreds of studies done on it non-ionizing radiation does not cause cancer. Not to mention that the frequencies used by 5G have been used by other things for years and clearly never caused much controversy. Same about GMO - you can read up on it and educate yourself, you can discover real things you should be upset about(like GMO crops which can resist glycophosphates so that farmers can use roundup to dessicate plants before harvest - the problem isn't the plants, the problem is the farming practice). So sure, we have the right to be wary - but that right should be followed by research, not by indulging in conspiracy theories about Billy Gates trying to control everyone with vaccines. That's just dumb.
- high_density 6y agoI think GP is saying our scientific knowledge might not be 100% perfect, and we might not know one or two things until later. You're a bit over-reacting -- you just made GP an anti-vaccer... maybe pointing out that we have better research tools and methodologies will do...
- gambiting 6y ago>>You're a bit over-reacting -- you just made GP an anti-vaccer. Oh god, that was not my intention in the slightest. All I wanted to say was that right now we have access to an immense amount of knowledge we can use to help ourselves make decisions, unlike Romans or even just people 100 years ago.
- konjin 6y ago>Prevent fires from cigarettes using asbestos upholstery. The past is an interesting place.
- type0 6y agoAbsolute History has some good documentaries on this called Hidden Killers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3Jef7i7v1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3Jef7i7v1U
- rayrag 6y agoThere is a Vice documentary from 2016 about asbestos - Why the Deadly Asbestos Industry is Still Alive and Well (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy3piCUPIkc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy3piCUPIkc).
- samizdis 6y agoInteresting article from The Guardian from 2019 [1], Britain’s death toll from asbestos at crisis level, figures reveal Huge negligence is alleged: [Roger] Maddocks [a lawyer specialising in workplace injuries] said the Factory Inspectorate knew by the end of the 19th century that heavy exposure to asbestos carried the risk of life-threatening respiratory disease and that by the 1960s it was public knowledge that exposure to small amounts of the substance carried the risk of mesothelioma. “Despite that people continued to be exposed, and in many cases heavily exposed, for years if not decades after the mid-60s,” he said. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jul/07/britains-death-toll-from-asbestos-at-crisis-level-figures-reveal https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jul/07/britains-dea... - edited immediately after posting to use the word negligence insteaad of cover-up
- KozmoNau7 6y agoThe British Pathé YouTube channel is an interesting rabbit hole to dive into, it's such an interesting mixture of "oh, that's neat", "they did what back then?" and the unending optimism about the future of technology and automation.
- zeristor 6y agoI had never heard of asbestos fire proof curtains
- idclip 6y agoSaw a documentary about israeli soldiers living in army asbestus housing. It was mortifying to reslize how backwords we still are.
- christophilus 6y agoThat housing was probably relatively safe. Asbestos in solid form isn’t the problem.
- sgt 6y agoI have a large asbestos roof, but it has been well maintained and has currently been re-sealed again. So no plans to replace it and frankly it seems quite a bit more sturdy than many other roofs I have seen.
- hyko 6y agoThe awful thing is is that when this video was being made, the dangers of Asbestos were already known and had been established decades earlier. Some of the applications don’t even make all that much sense, and are very much a case of trying to foist whatever you’re able to produce onto a gullible public. Capital owners and governments could conceivably have used the substance in a responsible way without exposing workers and consumers to additional risk, but it would probably have lowered their appetite for spreading it all over the environment if they had borne the costs upfront. Considering that they used to make vehicle brake linings out of the rotten stuff until the late 20th century, it’s clear that no such attempts were made. Even though the first documented death was in 1906.
- basicplus2 6y agoBang on. I have a set of 1927 Arthur Mee encyclopeadia and it lists every single Asbestos related disease in detail.
- ImprovedSilence 6y agoDo they not still make brake linings out of it? I thought that was still a use for it?
- hyko 6y agoOh my god – it turns out there never was an asbestos ban in the US...it was banned in the UK and 50 other countries in 1999 I think (although there was a dispensation until 2004 for repair of classic vehicles).
- MichaelZuo 6y agoYup, certain types of brake pads still use asbestos to this very day.
- colejohnson66 6y agoThe US never “needed” to ban it because consumer awareness of the downsides led to a de facto ban.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoAn attorney I worked for bought a practice, with dozens of 30yo, open mesothelioma cases - paying off at something like $12/yr.
- AnotherGoodName 6y agoWhat are some of the tactics to avoid compensation payouts?
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoI can't say. The cases were settled long before we acquired them. They're running on autopilot until the awardees die.
- KingPrad 6y agoIn the US, asbestos litigation has a special system where lots of companies are named in each suit, then they compete to eliminate themselves as the main contributors to the person's ailments. For example, if a person did a brake job in the 50s once, Napa Auto Parts is in the lawsuit because they made brake pads with asbestos. But oh, they were boilermaker for decades, working around asbestos-lined systems? Well, Napa is probably off the hook or they'll chuck a few thousand at the person to settle, leaving the larger source more on the hook. It's a game of subtraction and divvying up cost by contributing exposure mostly. Source: spouse worked on these cases.
- derefr 6y agoQuestion from a technopositivist perspective: is there anything that's almost-but-not-exactly asbestos (e.g. asbestos reacted to complex with some other molecule) that retains its advantages without the disadvantages? I get that one main reason we used asbestos was that it was cheap to produce (it's in the ground, it's plentiful) — but it also has some rather unique applications that are very hard to replicate (e.g. fire blankets.) Is there yet a "synthetic asbestos" or "treated asbestos" that captures these benefits, without the drawbacks involved in asbestos production+remediation? Or are the benefits of asbestos inherently linked to its drawbacks, through e.g. its fine-scale shape, similar to carbon nanotubes?
- MichaelZuo 6y agoNope, in fact it’s quite possible that any reasonably priced substitute will have similar properties given the current state of materials engineering. Of course if cost is no object something like aerogel may work even better.
- swebs 6y agoProbably glass fiber. Though its still harmful to breathe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_fiber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_fiber
- Animats 6y agoIt's frustrating. Two of the most long-lived building materials available are lead and asbestos. Lead pipes last centuries.