Franting About Asbestos

Minutes after watching this video on YT I watched one from someone else I sub to about the Talc/Asbestos 'scandal', suddenly seeing people walking down the road with face masks on doesn't seem so strange anymore.

Hi Stuart Its Stuart :-D. Asbestos is only a hazard if it becomes airborne and then inhaled. In your line of work it would be impractical to damp it down with a water spray bottle. This is a common defense but not much good to you. I would recommend that until you are 100% sure of the materials you use forced air ventilation or extraction. You could buy an inline kitchen extractor fan and some flexible duct as I did. Failing that wear a respirator ! Unlike the silly lead solder dangers Asbestos is dangerous as it can remain sitting in your lungs for years and will get round to biting you (usually when you are older). Play it safe, use the levels of caution you would with high voltage and you will be fine. Stay safe as Stuart's are a rare and valuable human variant as i'm sure your aware ;) Hope that helps you a little. Let me know if you have any questions as I have attended a course about dealing with it. All the best my friend.

I'd have liked to have been given a bit of information about what specifically I should do to take "precautions." I'm a bit young (mid-30's) and asbestos wasn't really in items anymore by the time I came around. I do however, work on a lot of old electronics gear as a hobby. Mostly 70's-80's, with 1960's probably being about the earliest, but once in a while something quite old shows up. I probably wouldn't know asbestos if I stared right at it!

I guess I'm really out of touch. I remember when the banned it, and thought it still was

Hey Fran, Umm did you re-upload this to YouTube? my comment and thumbs up are gone. o.O

Dane

I'm a child of the 1950's so I was exposed to it for the first 25-30 years of my life. Heaven knows how much dust I inhaled. These days, now we are more sensitive to the risk, I'll avoid it of course but I'll not panic if I discover it by accident.

Dave Davies

Which type of asbestos matters a lot. Blue or brown are definite hazards. White, possibly a minor hazard but not sure how serious. A problem that we face today is that the Green movement, having largely run out of real issues to campaign, are inventing ones to keep the ball rolling and the funds and and supporters coming in. The 'oceans awash with plastic' scare story is the latest propaganda. The reality is that the oceans contain a few 1-3mm dia pieces of plastic per cubic metre, and these mostly come from a few countries that allow dumping of waste directly into the sea. Banning plastic in the West won't stop this anyway. Stopping the malpractice will.. but that doesn't make for a good propaganda campaign. Climate change is another very questionable campaign, with renewable energy being even more questionable because it cannot even solve climate change anyway. At current installation rates it would take 500 years to replace all fossil fuels with wind turbines and solar panels. If we upped the installation rate to the point where it could be done in a decade or so, it would literally bankrupt the planet. (And achieve nothing because it wouldn't be reliable anyway.) The manic hatred of fracking in the UK is because they've seen how shale gas has lowered CO2 emissions and reduced coal pollution in the USA, and they're running scared that it could spell the end to their nice little wind turbine earner here.

I appreciate your candor. I do understand there are people like that here, as I assume they are everywhere. Despite recent events, I do hope they are in the minority everywhere.

Michael Aichlmayr

Sorry about the generalization, it's a long standing prejudice that Americans think they're alone in the world. It was probably never true, but I think it applies more to the previous generation that grew up with no internet and only local TV stations. Being a such a great country you can afford to ignore the rest of the world.

John Arild Lolland

Hi John. I would sincerely like to understand the sentiment 'as an American you by definition don't care'. I was born and live in the US. I certainly care about what happens in the world, and I am by no means in the minority. I'm a bit horrified to be rolled into such an awful generalization. Good catch, by the way, on the rockwool. I use it for starting chili peppers and other garden plants and have done careful research to make sure what I was using did not contain asbestos.

Michael Aichlmayr

I hate to say that I am old enough to remember when parents thought they were doing a great thing for their kids by giving them asbestos pajamas.

Leslie Deana

I wonder what is going to be next? What everyday items we use today that in the future they will look back and says "I can't believe they made X out of Y, didn't they know Y was lethal?"

Dave Curran

Interesting Fran. Asbestos is total forbidden here in Sweden since 1982. There are very strict regulation for demolition.

Good video and something to think about. But I want to point out that asbestos is banned in the EU and Australia (I know that as an American you by definition don't care, but some of your audience may). Also saying Rock Wool (aka mineral wool) is asbestos is a false statement, but some of the products from the American Rock Wool Manufacturing Company did contain asbestos (most notable is pipe insulation that was the subject of a law suit). It can also be hard to spot the difference between mineral wool and brown asbestos. The Danish company called Rockwool has, as far as I know, never made asbestos insulation and is still making insulation in Denmark where brown asbestos was banned since 1980.

John Arild Lolland

For decades I had a 12" square of heavy asbestos fabric that I used when using a torch to solder copper pipe inside walls (or near anything flammable). It was stored in an air-tight bag, and I always wore a mask while using it, then vacuumed up after using it. I was very glad to get rid of it when Nomex finally became usable for that purpose. Not ideal, and not nearly as good as asbestos, but it got the job done.

BobC

Very useful video. Asbestos seems to be like lead: not exactly safe, but for some applications there’s no good alternative. And there’s lots out there in older manufactured items. So when handling older things one almost has to assume it’ll be present and take appropriate precautions (including breathing mask for asbestos, as the fine particles breathed in are one of the biggest risks). Ewen

Ewen McNeill