Eliminating the Threat

While asbestos dangers are well documented, history has long avoided eliminating the threat it poses to human health.

We are starting to progress in our waste habits by recycling different streams of waste and using closed landfills constructively. Composting food waste and recycling plastics, glass, metals, cardboard and newspapers is our way of life. We are realizing the importance of installing waste-to-energy(WTE) plans on closed and active landfills to capture energy.

Separating recyclables from municipal waste before it is dumped in landfills, as well as landfill mining for recyclables are now prominent trends.

We create 250 million tons of waste per year. By practicing reduce, reuse and recycle, we are taking the right steps to minimize waste to landfills.

Sustainability Liability

Many companies are touting zero-waste-to-landfill from their manufacturing operations, however, when the actual facility is taken into account, that may be a false claim.

Companies are hiring or internally promoting sustainability officers who are responsible for complying with all environmental regulations, such as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA). CERCLA requires treatments that permanently and significantly reduce volume, mobility of hazardous substances and most importantly, toxicity.

While companies like General Motors, Ford and Chrysler tout sustainability achievements, over the past five years these companies have closed or sold approximately 180 manufacturing facilities. Most of these facilities were built before 1979 and all had to have asbestos-containing material installed in them when they were built.

Asbestos permeates most facilities built before 1979: utilities, military bases, government buildings, refineries, factories, homes and landfills: collectively known as our “built environment.”

Asbestos has been documented in archaeological diggings found in pottery and chinking of homes in Scandinavia from 300 B.C.

History Lessons

The use of asbestos has a long history. Asbestos has been used for more than 2,000 years, called by the ancient Greeks “inextinguishable,” because of superior resistance to fire.

The Greek, Strabo, as well as the Roman, Pliny the Elder, noticed the sickness of the lungs and the early deaths of slaves who worked in the asbestos mines, and also in slaves who wove asbestos table clothes, napkins, burial garments and asbestos into wicks for the Eternal Flame of the Vestal Virgins.

Little known to Strabo and Pliny the Elder, their observations of slaves contracting lung illness would become a fatal, proven fact almost 2,000 years later.

Strabo and Pliny never could have realized or predicted the lung disease caused by asbestos would become the world’s greatest industrial disaster ever known to man and the largest class action law suits ever to swamp the court system. As right as their observations were on the fact that asbestos caused “sickness of the lungs in those who worked with it,” they also could not have predicted that more than 3,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with Mesothelioma each year, 125 million people worldwide encounter asbestos in the home or workplace; every five minutes someone in the world dies from asbestos-related illnesses.

This number amounts to 100,000 people per year and is expected to increase to 5 to 10 million people by 2030. It is a fact that every year there are more people killed by asbestos than in road accidents. Although used through the centuries, the use of asbestos flourished at the onset of the industrial revolution in the 18^th century when factories boomed and asbestos was seen as miracle mineral due to its fire resistant, chemical resistant and tinsel strength. Industry created many different products that included asbestos.

In the railroad industry it was used to line refrigeration units, boxcars, and cabosses, and the material was found to be especially useful as insulation for pipes, boilers and fireboxes in stream locomotives and as refractory brick in the coal-fired engines and furnaces. The automobile industry used asbestos in brake linings and clutches, as well as in wiring necessary for lighting and ignitions.

The construction industry found many uses of asbestos for factory and home building products: roofing material (both felt and cement board with asbestos embedded in it), pipe and boiler covering, floor tile, taping, acoustical ceiling tiles, Transite furnace flu, and most dangerously as vermiculite in attic insulation and plant soil additive. Vermiculite was manufactured in Libby, Mont., by W.R. Grace who also manufactured asbestos-containing spray-on fireproofing known as Monokote. Monokote was widely used in thousands of buildings throughout the world. One well known site being the World Trade Center, which still had asbestos containing material when it was attacked.

Referred to as “Transite in the United States,” the material permeates Australia and many other warm climate countries.

The construction industry, by far, gave asbestos-containing material products a great deal of uses, as did the shipbuilding industry. Because of the widespread commercial uses of asbestos, the cases of asbestos and mesothelioma started to come to light.

In 1899, British physician, Dr. H. Montague Murray, discovered the first case of asbestos and recorded an abstract named “Curious Bodies.” In 1906, French factory inspector, Auribolt, discovered the first asbestos lung disease, mesothelioma in 50 people. The use of asbestos and its dangers became so common that by 1918 life insurance companies started to charge higher premiums for asbestos workers.

Too Little, Too Late

Unfortunately 1918 was too late, because as the years went on and asbestos diseases became more prevalent and obvious, many financially solid white glove insurance companies were forced into bankruptcy by asbestos lawsuits, as were myriad of companies who manufactured asbestos-containing material.

By 1930 it was well known to manufactures that asbestos-containing products were a cause of lung disease with death to follow, but many chose to not expose the truth.

The U.S. Public Health Service recognized the effects asbestos has on human health and recommended guidelines for asbestos exposure as early as 1938, but with the onset of World War II, the Public Health Service recommendations were ignored.

The expansion of existing military bases, the building of new military bases, amplified shipbuilding, and new government buildings, such as the Pentagon, all used asbestos.

The Defense Logistics Agency during World War II bought and stored in silos around the country raw asbestos in case asbestos did not become available.

With so much asbestos in our built environment around the world and the never-ending and ongoing illnesses caused by asbestos, coupled with the landfill shortage, why are we not destroying the asbestos to prevent the harm to humans?

Methods of Destruction

There are U.S.-Environmental-Protection-Agency-approved technologies that destroy asbestos by high temperature: plasma torch, vitrification and hearth oven, and a non-thermal process, ABCOV®, which works by a chemical-physical reaction.

With the ABCOV® process, asbestos destruction is followed through the process until the asbestos is destroyed. In high-temperature processes, asbestos has to run through the process, be cooled down and be tested for asbestos. If asbestos is found in the batch that was run through the high temperature units, it must be put back through the unit until destroyed.

Asbestos is and will be a killer as long as it remains in our built environment. A Wall Street Journal “Pepper … and Salt” cartoon that has sat on my desk for at least 17 years says it best: A father sitting on the couch looking at his son’s report card with great disappointment and letting his son know how he felt. The son replied: “If your generation doesn’t learn to save the planet, it won’t matter if my generation can’t read or write.” 

Tony Nocito, Managing Member of the ABCOV® Companies, LLC, has developed, commercialized and markets the ABCOV asbestos destruction process. He has 25 years asbestos abatement experience and 26 years construction/demolition industry experience. Visit ABCOV® Blog. Guest Blogger Featured in Construction & Demolition Recycling. 

Warren Buffett Trades Mesothelioma Death for Money

It is not for the victims of asbestos diseases, but for the lawyer's self-interest that asbestos litigation occurs, and the self-interest of Mr. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway's group of Insurance companies that are responsible for asbestos liabilities.

The asbestos litigation industry is a multibillion dollar industry that spends more on advertising than Coca-Cola. Asbestos litigation provides substantial- steady income to asbestos litigation firms and their litigators as long as payments are made to the victims.

We know Mr. Buffett as the Oracle of Omaha, a highly praised investor and a seemingly a nice guy who plays a Ukulele and sings at the conventions of the companies he owns.

Mr. Buffett has proven to make the right investments at the right time, because he sees the future and has the cash to buy it. With cash and enough time, time being the key word, you can make yourself one of the wealthiest men in the world, as Mr. Buffet.

Mr. Buffett's, Berkshire Hathaway, has recently purchased a litany of insurance companies that are directly responsible for asbestos and/or hazardous/toxic liabilities, which Mr. Buffett agreed to take on with this purchase.

So why would the world's wisest investor buy such portentous liability?

The answer: along with that liability comes tons of billions in cash, known as the float, which is invested at great returns, as long as Mr. Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway insurance companies can deny, delay or not pay plaintiffs' (victims) claims. The float is money held by the insurance companies to pay the victims of asbestos and/or hazardous/toxic diseases.

Asbestos and /or hazardous/toxic diseases are a death sentence. In litigation, the defending law firms are always looking for angels to hold off payments, pay as little as possible or nothing at all to the plaintiffs, which buys time.

It is estimated by A.M. Best, an insurance company rating firm, that asbestos claim losses will surge to $121 billion dollars with no end in sight.

A.M. Best also estimates insurers are incurring $2 billion in asbestos claims each year, as well as paying out $2.5 billion to victims each year.

According to Ajit Jain Berkshire Hathaway's insurance companies paid out $1.4billion dollars in asbestos and /or hazardous/toxic claims last year. Do the math: that leaves Berkshire, according to A.M. Best, $1.1 billion to invest while fending off the losses of $2 billion a year being held in the float and invested while the cases are being detained or slowly litigated.

Also, Berkshire Hathaway's insurance company corporate-maneuvers left litigators puzzled, not knowing who to sue, payments are not being made to the plaintiffs while Berkshire's defense litigator's buy time to allow the float money to make required target profits, instead of paying the victims.

According to the Fox Business News, "Berkshire said its insurance and other revenue jumped 14% to $35.92 billion.

Mr. Buffett quote: "We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful".

If you are dying from asbestos or hazardous/toxic diseases, you will certainly be fearful of dying, but more so for the future of your loved ones.

Fear and/or desire are the greatest motivators. If you fear you will die broke from asbestos or a hazardous/toxic disease, leaving your family with nothing, you will quickly have the desire, for peace of mind before dying, to settle for a lesser amount that may be paid sometime in the future to your loved ones.

But if the Berkshire Hathaway insurance companies outright refuse to pay, because Berkshire Hathaway has to make its targeted bottom-line profits ----- what are your choices? - suffer more and die broke!

In life our true character shows through at one point or another. If we are lucky to live long enough, we will have enough time to adjust flaws in our character for the better.

Mr. Buffet is running out of time, but the aforementioned proves his strong ties to the belief of Gordon Gekko: Greed is good. 

I would make a suggestion that Mr. Buffett please put a good portion of the money he makes from the float in scientific and medical research that cure diseases caused by asbestos and other hazardous/toxic substances and invest in environmental technologies that permanently remove asbestos and other hazardous/toxic substances from our environment in order to save lives.

Instead of the beliefs of Gordon Gekko, I recommend Mr. Buffet follow the beliefs of Oscar Schindler, "To save one life is to save the world". 

The Ugly, The Bad and The Good of Waste Disposal

I know, I know it is supposed to be The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, but I don’t personally know Clint Eastwood and this blog, in my opinion, works better backwards.

The Ugly: recycler uses recycle operation as landfill; construction supervisor mishandles asbestos, landfill fires, landfill odors and landfill toxic fumes, landfill leachate run-off, illegal E-Waste disposal, manufacturers who knew and know that the products, such as Lead, Chromium, Asbestos were and are lethal to human beings, but manufacture for profit anyway, asbestos companies that dumped asbestos illegally in upstate New York, the asbestos truck that purposely dumped asbestos in the street in front of a grammar school, violators who do not safely handle and dispose toxins, the companies that are not precautious enough to stop environmental disasters, oil companies, the corporations that have toxic, hazardous or regulated waste that can be treated on site, but landfill them for our future generations to deal with, the list goes on and most received prison time, all except the executives that are politically connected, like W.R. Grace, but a Swiss billionaire asbestos manufacturer was sentenced to 18 years in prison for asbestos deaths – in Italy – no less! There is something wrong with the U.S., because no one received prison time for killing a town of people in Libby, Montana. Now that is really UGLY!

The Bad: The bad are the people who care, but only occasionally, the bad are the people who find it difficult to go out of their way to recycle and only recycle when convenient, the bad are the people who throw everything into one garbage bin, the bad are the people who throw waste in the street instead of carrying it to a garbage bin or a recycle bin.

The Good: The good ardently believe the more we recycle the better we will become as humans, the better our children will be as they grow, the less future pollution our children will have to deal with and the less pollution will enter the environment, the less garbage will be handled and dumped in a landfill or put through an incinerator, believe in conserving our natural resources, support global climate change and will continue to create new industries and jobs though innovation of recycling products.

The good believe in a circular economy: what comes out of the manufacturing product, after its end of life’s cycle, is able to go back into the manufacturing the same or similar product. The good understand the importance of buying products that are recyclable and/or are made from recycled material. The good don’t take shopping bags from the grocery store, but they bring their own non-disposable shopping bags to the grocery store.

The good understand the importance of the separation of recyclables, they buy and use designated recycles bins. They believe in composting, paper, cardboard, bottle, and can recycling.

Hell! The good believe in recycling everything they can possibly recycle to save our planet.

Now ask yourself: Which one am I?

Similarities Between the Waste and Death Industry

In a blog recently published on Waste & Recycling News, Maria Kirch writes about being environmentally responsible in death.

The blog discusses the new eco-friendly coffins that can be decorated to your desires and biodegradable corporate clothing line known as the first 100% environmentally responsible tailored funeral wear.

It started me to think about death, population, garbage, landfilling and burial plots.

Let's take death and population first. Currently approximately 150,000 people die each day and it is expected that 40% of these people will opt for cremation (incineration). Some who die unforeseen deaths and are healthy at death will hopefully donate their organs to medical institutions for reuse to better the life of humans who need them, i.e. human organ recycling.

Cemetery space is becoming like landfill space, diminishing greatly. Presently, in the United States, 230 million tons of solid waste is landfilled each year. The population growth of 19.5% for every 1,000 people will not only create a vast increase in garbage disposal, but also create a vast increase in burial ground requirements.

Will land be used for garbage, for cemetery plots or for food? Statistics point out that one has to realize the future of the earth's limitations and the future use of its land do to population growth. The siting of new landfills, as well as the need for burial space, will forcibly make our earth's livable ground disappear in a short time.

One thought might be, can we use old landfills for burial grounds? Just the thought of being buried in a garbage dump makes me cringe.

Landfill mining is starting to be become a trend by digging out the recyclables to create more landfill space. Now done in the Netherlands, the reality will that all landfills will install onsite waste-to-energy units to incinerate or cremate the remaining landfill waste after the recyclable are mined. They are starting to remove the recyclables before landfilled and incinerate (cremate) the rest of the garbage for energy without putting it in a landfill.

Incineration or cremation of anything leaves a minimal amount of ash that can be disposed of or recycled, and when a human is cremated, the ash can be kept in an urn or spread over the person's favorite spot.

The aforementioned will give us back our natural resources found in the recyclables, and eliminate a great portion of our solid waste by creating much needed energy and land space.

As hard as it is we humans have to start to think seriously about our environmental impact while we are busy resting in peace. Each and every one of us must think about organ donation, i.e. recycling, land space, cremation as opposed to cemetery plots, while at the same time taking advantage of the eco-friendly coffins, and biodegradable corporate clothing.

If the waste industry can do it -- so can us humans!

I'm Guilty Of Illegal Dumping

I live in downtown New York City, one block west of City Hall. My office is approximately 2 1/2 blocks north of City Hall. I point this out, because many demonstrations are held right outside City Hall with loud speakers for the protesters to announce their protests so everyone can hear them within a half-mile radius, they march or gather for blocks.

During these demonstrations, it is common to have a strong police presence lining the streets for safety. Now an additional safety precaution has been implemented since the Boston Marathon bombing, removal of all curbside garbage cans by sanitation.

If you have never been in New York, it is a city of high-rise office and apartment buildings in most areas. As much as New Yorkers understand the importance of recycling, it is hard to recycle in a large apartment building or office building that do not provide separation recycling bins. Even the curbside separation recycling bins are far and in-between. Although I found a set of garbage, bottles and cans only, and newspapers and magazines only recycling bins outside City Hall and across the street there were two solar powered Big Belly compactors. I guess City Hall politicians were setting an example, but so far they have not provided these bins throughout the city.

In my office we have water in bottles and soda in cans. When we finish the drink we put them in separate bins for recycling. When the bins are full we recycle and help the homeless at the same time by filling two large shopping bags with the cans and bottles, leaving them for the collectors of these bottles and cans next to a curb side garbage can. These collectors are usually older, short in stature with a hunch, Asian woman who sift through bags of garbage in every block filling large clear plastic bags with bottles and cans carrying them over their shoulder on a broom handle with a bag as large as they filled each end or filled shopping carts with the same size bags.

They do this for nickel redemption on each returnable.

The strange thing is if you offer them money they won't take it and consider it an insult.

On July 3, I left my office with two large shopping bags filled with bottles and cans. When I got downstairs there were no garbage cans in sight, because of labor demonstration at City Hall. I walked down until I got to my block where I finally saw a garbage can across the street. Next to the garbage can where two sanitation workers and a sanitation inspector talking, I asked if it would be OK if I left these bags for the Asian woman.

His reply: "You know that is illegal dumping and if he," pointing to the inspector, "wanted to, he could arrest you."

I put them next to the garbage can anyway.

Besides reminding me that it was illegal dumping (it does state on each curbside garbage container "Liter Only: No Household Trash; No Business Trash, 100 Dollar Fine") he reminded me how much he hated those Asian woman, this was not a prejudice remark, but a complaint that the Asian woman caused them extra work, messing up the waste bags for sanitation to clean-up.

That afternoon my son and I were going to a movie. I walked across the street where I live to get my son. When I walked back across the street, I found that the sanitation workers where gone and so where the bags of bottles and cans, but no Asian woman were in sight. I guess I wasn't arrested or fined, because the bottles and cans provided coffee money for those sanitation workers.

This incident set-off my curiosity and sent me on a quest to better understand garbage and recycling in New York City. So I started to walk through the neighborhood to see how much illegal dumping went on, quite a bit.

I also found a number of curbside garbage cans with white trash bags next to them with the words ACE Empowering the Homeless. ACE stands for The Association of Community Employment Programs for the Homeless. This program helps people who are either in a rehabilitation program and have a doctor's clearance to work or are homeless. ACE people are street sweepers who use these ACE bags for trash; when full, place them next to a curbside garbage container. After speaking with one of the ACE workers who was happy to have the job, I realized ACE made a great contribution to trash clean-up and to human dignity. The ACE person reminded me that ACE takes donations.

Back to the Asian woman, in my travels I spotted an Asian woman working on a pile of clear recyclable bags that was five feet high and a half of block long. Mind you these bags are only supposed to contain newspapers and small cardboard items, bottles or cans are supposed to be in separate clear plastic bags.

This woman worked efficiently, precisely, carefully and extremely quickly, untying the bags picking out the bottles and cans and neatly tying the bags back up. When I left she had four large bags, three and a half feet tall filled to the brim and was only a quarter of the way through the pile.

The way I see it, these women are doing the city a great service by supporting themselves; not taking welfare; supporting New York's recycling program by lessening the waste burden for the sanitation workers, who had coffee on me.

Honest Truths

I have to be honest about my life, a life of sever Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). My father had it. I know, because I asked him why he only went to one month of high school, he said, I couldn’t study or sit still to read.

ADHD is hereditary; some of my children have it.

At age 30, not knowing what ADHD was or that I had it, I made up my mind that I was going to learn how to read and write. So every night I went home and forced myself to read. I had a college PhD English Professor who lived across the hall from me, Elaine Levy. Elaine agreed for $50.00 an hour to give me private English lessons, chapter by chapter.

I worked for many years to improve my English, vocabulary and writing.

I am more than appreciative when an environmental magazine publishes one of my articles and more than grateful to Craines Waste and Recycling News editors and Maria Kirch who allow me to be published monthly.

From one of my writings, I received an email from Garry Van Heest, Vice President -Remediation at Directional Technologies, Inc:

Tony,

My Dad was a self-employed carpenter from 1950 to 1970.  He was exposed to dust from asbestos-containing building products (as was I as a kid when I worked with him).

I agree: this material has to be removed from our environment.  There are documented cases of people getting meso from one exposure and you do not get the disease unless you are exposed - no documented cases of anyone with the disease that was not exposed.

As you can see from my LinkedIn profile, I am an environmental professional with industrial hygiene experience.  It really blindsided me when my Dad was diagnosed.  I thought it was only people who worked in the asbestos industry that contracted the disease.

I am joining your mailing list.

Keep up the good work.

Garry

I was humbled by the fact that my writing has been able to cause environmental awareness and I was flattered and thankful for Garry’s email. I asked if I could use his email. 

Garry’s answer: “You have my authorization to use my story - anything to help even one more person from contracting mesothelioma”.  Garry

There are many executives of companies, who have allowed pollution for profit; upon their death their children will inherit their money, as I inherited ADHD. The pollution created by that money is also hereditary to their children as well as many others will involuntarily pay, either by environmental clean-up costs or by contracting a detrimental and fatal illness, much like Garry’s father. It is inevitable!

Science has found a way to deal with ADHD using medication and therapy.

Science must find a way to deal with the many environmental pollutants by creating technologies to take them out of our environment once and for all or we will continue to pay until we are broke or terminally ill. This is the Honest Truth!

The Impact of Environmental Litigation

Let's explore the history of toxic substances in our environment from the time we knew that the toxic substances were harmful and lethal to our health.

Let us start with asbestos -- the most litigated of the hazardous, toxic materials.

The Greeks, the earliest users of asbestos 3,000 years ago, considered the value of asbestos almost equal to the value of gold. Chrysotile, the most commonly used asbestos, comes from the Greek word of gold, chysos, and fiber, tilos.

The Greeks and the Romans recorded that slaves who worked with asbestos and in asbestos mines died early from lung sickness.

The industrial revolution brought on the expanded use of asbestos, because of its superior fire retardant ability and its tensile strength. Asbestos products were used to contain friction and heated parts of machinery, protecting that part of the machinery from wear and tear and protecting the worker from burns. The use of asbestos in these applications made sense from a manufacturing point of view, but not from a health point of view.

The vast increase of mining and processing asbestos during the industrial revolution was proven in the late 1800s to damage the lungs, causing death.

The use of asbestos in manufacturing continued for more than 100 years without regulation pertaining to the safety of the worker. Asbestos is still used today, in spite of the health effects.

Chromium has been used for over 2,000 years. Although asbestos relates to lung cancer, hexavalent chromium or chromium VI, is related to a mired amount of diseases, lung cancer only being one of them. As early as 1930, the effects of respiratory cancer in workers in the chrome industry were diagnosed. Eventually, a mired amount of other chromium related diseases that ranged from asthma, liver disease and skin cancer to cardiovascular disease, as well as many other lethal effects to the human organs were discovered from exposure to chromium.

Chromium cancer clusters can be isolated and identified to specific areas of our environment, such as former chromium manufacturing sites and dumping sites from those chromium manufacturing sites.

Lead has been used for over 6,000 years and the effects of lead poisoning have been known for over 2,500 years. All through history the effects of non-occupational lead poisoning have been documented.

In recent years publications on the devastating effects of lead paint has permanently impaired the learning ability of children.

The industries that used the aforementioned hazardous, toxins in their manufacturing operations have caused devastating effects on society and loved ones.

The business of environmental litigation has cut deeply into industries profits, causing many to go bankrupt.

Although litigation does not cure or bring back a loved one, it says loudly and clearly that companies must take advanced steps to protect the environment and loved ones, because there is no dollar amount that can buy a human life.