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Comment by edelbitter | Hacker News Reader

I guess some forms of asbestos are fine to use in residential development.. as long as houses never burn or get damaged in earthquakes or suffer flood damage or need extensive renovations.. and as long as we do not care about some unimportant landscapes and river systems in (ideally, canada or russia or something of the sort) and all of its current and future inhabitants.

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Asbestos in safe forms does not become dangerous from fire or earthquake or flood damage.

It does becomes dangerous from badly done demolition work. And they are harmful to the people mining and manufacturing them.

But for a long while, almost every material was extremely harmful for the people mining and manufacturing them. It really took a while to determine that asbestos is actually worse than fiberglass or gypsum.

Even then, it's overblown. The fibers embedded in the cement siding that was common for a while as an example, that's just never going to be friable to a degree that matters. Not to mention the issue is really more of a long term exposure thing. You'd need to be quite an unlucky person to take one whiff of some asbestos fibers and get mesothelioma decades later.

It's perfectly safe to sit in a room full of asbestos insulation like it is to sit in front of any computer from the 90s (leaded solder) but it's still good to ban asbestos just like it was probably good to switch to RoHS solder.

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